Black and grey silhouette tattoo on a forearm showing a row of trees moving from full foliage to bare branches, with small human figures beneath.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Silhouette trees and figures along a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A row of black silhouetted trees runs along the forearm, with full leafy crowns on the left gradually becoming bare branches on the right. Beneath the trees are silhouetted figures, including children, a couple holding hands, a person with a cane, and small shapes near headstones at the far end. The work uses solid black shapes with soft grey shading in the foliage, set against plain skin and blue denim.

Blackwork Forearm Tree Silhouette Couple Balloon Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Hollis planted the first sapling the spring the new platform opened, though the stationmaster swore the clay at Thornley would never take. She watered it from a tin can before the milk train, the way her father had watered the signal hedge. By the time the line was electrified, the trunk was thick enough that the village children used its shade for their sandwiches, two small brothers tying a balloon to a low branch while the train pulled out.

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Frank was the one who came to meet her there in his good coat, the afternoon they agreed to marry, and the leaves overhead were already dropping onto the bench he dusted for her. They courted under those branches for three summers. He kept the timetable in his breast pocket and checked it against the clock on the wall, and he never once missed a train she was on.

Later he needed a stick to reach the bench, and then he needed someone to walk with him to it. Ada counted the trees along the platform on her way back from the ticket office, six of them now, each one a little barer than the last. The sixth had lost its crown in the winter gales and stood with its arms raised like a man giving up his coat.

They buried Frank in Thornley churchyard beside the wall, close enough to hear the 4.12 whistle. Ada still comes down on Thursdays to sweep the platform. She leaves the tin can by the bare trunk, full of water, for whoever comes next.