Realistic colour tattoo of a river with tall green trees and rocks in shallow water, running down the inner forearm.

River landscape tattoo on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A realistic river landscape covers the forearm, with a tall tree on the left, a wooded bank curving to the right and a calm stretch of water with rounded rocks in the foreground. The shading is soft and painterly, with layered greens, browns and grey-blue tones in the water. The scene fills the forearm from the elbow area down to the wrist, and the person's black t-shirt sits behind it.

Realism Forearm River Tree Rock Water Landscape Forest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud Harrow told the stranger the ferry was not running. The rope had gone in the spring flood and the Crossing Stone was under two feet of brown water. He thanked her and sat on the flat rock below the alder anyway, a leather case across his knees, and watched the river slide over its pebbles the way it had since before the church was built.

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Her grandmother used to say the river kept a count. Every person who had ever waded the shallows was owed a stone, and the stones were the ones that showed grey and round in a dry August. The old ferryman, Tobias Quill, had gone under the middle one in the winter of the big frost, trying to bring a goat across. They never found him. The goat swam to the far bank and lived to be nineteen.

In the morning the stranger opened the case. Inside were a sheet of paper and a tin of pencils, and he drew the bend, the tall tree on the near bank, the wooded slope curving off to the right. When he was done he laid the sheet on the rock under a fat stone and walked into the water up to his knees, stepping from stone to stone until the current hid his legs. He did not come back.

Maud found the drawing still dry at noon. In the shallows he had shaded a dark shape like a man crouching, and nobody in Thornwick could say who had put it there. She pinned the sheet to the ferry shed wall. Every August after that she counted the stones, and when the count came out right she took the boat across for nothing.