Forearm tattoo of red and black storm clouds with pale lightning forks, and bare tree silhouettes fading into red on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red lightning and tree silhouettes on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a stormy sky with jagged pale lightning forks running across red and black clouds. On the right side, bare black tree branches stand against a red glow that fades into the skin. Soft blended shading gives the clouds depth, while the lightning is rendered in crisp, light lines.

Forearm Lightning Storm Cloud Tree Branches Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dora Pell had kept the tally on the byre lintel for eleven years, one scratch for every time the sky cracked open above Cold Edge and the ash on the ridge took the bolt. Thirty-four notches by the spring of the flood, and the wood was grey with them. Her brother wanted the tree felled. The surveyor from the water board wanted it left standing, because a dead ash on a ridge made a fine picture from the reservoir road, and the county had paid for photographs.

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She went up the hill the evening the red came. The cloud over the moor had gone the colour of a cut thumb, black at its bellies, with the light underneath it pink and wrong. She carried a paraffin lamp, a spade and a young rowan wrapped in wet sacking, because her mother had told her that a struck tree wants something living planted beside it, or the lightning goes looking for the next thing standing alone. She did not believe that. She carried the rowan anyway.

The first fork came down while she was still forty yards off. It was pale, almost white, and it ran down the cloud in a dozen branches before it touched the ash, and the whole ridge lit like a stove door swinging open. She heard the crack a second later and felt it in her back teeth. When she reached the stump the wood was smoking and the bark had split into long bright veins, and nothing was left of the black branches but their shadows, laid across the heather like ink.

She dug the hole in the thin light, set the rowan into the ash roots and trod the earth down with her boots. The rain began as she worked. Down in the village the lamps came on one by one, and she thought of the tally on the lintel and did not go back for the knife. She would carve the thirty-fifth notch in the morning, if there was a morning. Behind her the sky was still doing its slow red business, and for once she was glad of something small growing under it.