Forearm tattoo in red and black with white-veined lightning cracks across the skin and bare black branches along the outer edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red lightning and branches on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm tattoo shown in close view against a wooden surface and a pale green cloth. Bright white jagged lines resembling lightning or cracks run through a saturated red field, with dark smoky shading in places. Bare black branches spread across the right side of the forearm, fading into the skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, the fire has given up and the wind has the rest of the hall to itself. You'll want the tale of the oak, not the lords, because nobody remembers lords. Keep your cup still while I tell it.

Keep reading

The oak came up through the chapel floor of Harrowgate Keep the summer after the siege, pushing through a crack in the east wall as if the stone had asked for it. The night the last lord rode out and never returned, a storm came down off the moor and struck the tree so hard the whole valley saw it. Light ran through the trunk and out along every branch, and the wood came up red as a forge, with white veins through it like the cracks in the walls.

Brannoch the mason swore he would have it down. He took his axe to the trunk one morning, and sparks ran up the grain like rivers, and the blade rang back at him as though the tree were laughing. He dropped the axe in the nettles and never picked it up. Every storm since, the stones of the keep light along those same white lines, and the bare branches spread across the courtyard, black against a sky gone the colour of embers.

My grandmother said the oak keeps a tally of everyone who walks beneath it, and that is why the bark is always warm to the hand. So when you climb the hill tomorrow, touch it lightly and say your name plainly. Mind the cracks, though. They still hum.

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