Black and grey pine tree silhouettes tattooed on a forearm above a gold wristwatch, against a pale wall.

Pine trees on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tall pine tree rises up the inside of a forearm, flanked by smaller conifers that fade into the skin toward the wrist. The trees are rendered in fine, layered linework and soft grey shading, with the ink becoming denser near the wrist. The photograph shows the forearm from the side against a plain pale background, with a gold wristwatch and the hand partly visible.

Realism Forearm Pine tree Tree Forest Conifer

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer to the fire, child, for it is failing and my voice carries only so far in the cold. You want to know why Brother Anselm kept the tall pine on the north slope when the abbot ordered it felled for the new roof? I will tell it, but I tell it once each winter, so hold your questions until I am done.

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The abbot wanted the timber. Anselm climbed that tree with a rope looped over his shoulder and an iron hook in his belt, and when he came down he said the pine had been seeded before the first stone of this house was laid. He would not let it be cut. Every spring after, he walked the path down to the valley where the forest gives way to barley, and he planted a young pine at the edge of the field, so the dark of the trees would reach down toward the mill. Those small ones were his children, he said, and they grew slower than he did.

The winter the snow came early, the miller's boy went up the slope after a lost goat and did not come back. The brothers searched until their lanterns guttered. It was Anselm who found him, sitting against the foot of the great pine where the lowest branches made a dry room the snow could not reach. The boy said the tree had kept the wind off him and that he had heard it humming all night, like someone counting.

Anselm died many years later, and the brothers buried him at the foot of that pine. If you walk down to the valley in the morning, look at the trees along the river. The ones nearest the mill are pale and thin, the youngest of his planting. The ones higher up are darker, and the old pine at the top is darkest of all, so that the forest seems to start in the field and climb back up the hill, as if it had only ever been trying to get home.