Small solid black pine tree tattoo on the side of a hand, with a forest in the background and a silver ring with blue stones on another finger.

Small pine tree on the hand

Botanical · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small pine tree is tattooed on the side of a hand, drawn in solid black ink with simple, tapering branches. The hand is held up against a blurred forest of conifers and grass, and a silver ring with two blue stones sits on a finger. A smaller, faint blue tattoo is also partly visible on another finger.

Botanical Hand Pine tree Tree Forest Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cones were still shut when Mairi Cathcart climbed the north face of Carn Dubh with a tin of seed in her coat, because the old Scots pines only let go after a hard frost, and that year the frost had not come. She had walked three days from the bothy at Glenfallach with a sack of spades, a ledger and a bad knee, and every ridge she crested showed her the same grey slope of dead birch and bracken.

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At the summit stood a single pine, bent flat by a hundred winters, its trunk split and silvered. She sat with her back against it and talked the way her grandmother had talked to the sheep, telling it about the pit village below, the flood that took the mill, and the boy who had walked out to sea and never come back. The tree did not answer. The wind did, and it carried a small brown tick from the branches, a cone opening in the thin sunlight.

She shook three seeds into her palm, winged and no bigger than fingernail clippings. Two blew off before she could close her hand. The third she pressed into a crack of wet granite beneath the split trunk and covered with a pinch of moss, then wrote the date in the ledger under the word replanted, crossed it out, and wrote begun instead.

Forty years later, walkers coming up from Glenfallach stopped at a young pine no taller than a man's shoulder, leaning east toward the water as if listening for someone. They never knew the ledger existed, only that the path was easier to find now, marked by a single dark spire rising above the heather like a finger pointing the way home.