Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a leaning tree with a triangle and arc linework on the inner forearm, with the paper stencil design beside it.

Stippled tree and geometric lines on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A leaning tree with a full, stippled canopy and a textured trunk sits on the forearm, with thin geometric lines forming a triangle and dashed arcs beneath it. The canopy is built from dense dots, while the trunk uses fine dots and short strokes for bark texture, and the lines are crisp and solid. The image is in black and grey, and a paper drawing of the same design sits to the left against a white sheet.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Tree Triangle Arc Geometric line Stippling

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keeper's girl was the first to notice the pine had moved. Her father had kept the light at Carrick Ness for thirty years and never once looked at the stunted tree below the wall, though it leaned a little further out to sea each winter, bent like an old man reaching for a dropped glove. Mairi was nine and had no one to talk to but the gulls and the tree.

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She knotted a length of tarred cord and pegged one end to the lamp room sill. She walked the other end down the path to the pine, then out across the turf to the black rock where the Estrella had gone down. Where the cord bent, she set a stone to mark the place. Then she sat on the wall and drew it all on a slate: a triangle, with a dashed bow of line swinging round the corner like a gate, because her father had taught her that a sum done with string is a sum you can trust.

When the mist came down in February, the herring boats steered by the chart pinned to the kitchen wall, and the chart still showed the pine standing upright. Mairi told him the tree had changed its angle, so the reef sat a cable further east than the ink said. Her father did not laugh. He took up his pen, and the next morning he drew the true bearing from the tree, and the boats came home.

Each spring after that, Mairi climbed down with the cord and measured the lean again. She notched the lintel where the shadow of the pine fell at noon, and the notches ran in a crooked line like the trunk itself. The men on the boats called them the girl's marks, and nobody who came round the Ness in fog ever needed to ask where the rock was.