Small black pine tree tattoo in a solid silhouette style on a person's shoulder, seen from behind against green trees.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small pine tree on a shoulder

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black pine or fir tree sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade. The tree has a simple, filled silhouette with a tapered trunk and tiered branches, with no shading or fine detail. The ink is black on fair skin, set against a black off-shoulder top and a blurred outdoor background of green trees and grass.

Blackwork Botanical Shoulder Pine tree Tree Silhouette

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind your boots on that step, it's gone soft since the thaw. Right, you'll want the stool. The surveyors came up the glen the year the bridge washed out, with a ledger and a chain, and not one of them could agree where the boundary ran. There was only one thing on Carn Dubh they couldn't argue about, a single Scots pine standing alone on the shoulder of the hill, the only thing up there with its feet set firm.

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Old Morag kept the ewes on the far side. She said a jay had dropped the seed, which is the lie you tell children, because nothing grows in that rock unless someone wanted it to. Every autumn she climbed up with a tin of tar and a bent knife and cut back the dead lower branches so the trunk stood straight as a candle. The shepherds laughed at her for it. They laughed less the winter the snow lay six feet deep and the only shape visible for miles was that dark run of tiered branches, pointing the way down to the bothy.

When Morag died, her papers went to the estate, and a young clerk with clean hands came up to measure the land for sale. He wanted the pine gone, since it stood in the line of the new fence. He laid out his chain and found the numbers would never close without it. So he left the tree where it was and wrote a single line in pencil in the margin of the ledger: the only tree on the hill that knows where it is.

Mind the gate on your way out. You can still see it from the road if you have the light behind you. That's the trick with the dark things, they show best against the rest.