Black and grey realism tattoo of a tall conifer tree with shaded branches and a rooted trunk, running down the inner forearm.

Tall conifer tree on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tall conifer tree runs vertically along the inner forearm, with its trunk flaring into roots at the base and its branches drooping and thinning towards the top. The tree is rendered in fine, layered shading with soft grey gradients and dark accents in the foliage, giving it a realistic, dimensional look. The photo is black and white, with the tattoo centred against a dark background and a pale sleeve at the top edge.

Realism Botanical Forearm Tree Conifer Pine tree Branches Root Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Osric had been told twice by the prior that the fir had to come down before the new bell frame could go up. He stood at its foot in the wet February light and looked past the drooping limbs to the leader, long since thinned and bent like a crooked finger against the grey. Where the trunk met the ground it spread into roots as broad as cart wheels, and they had lifted the lavender bed in the cloister by a hand's width and split two of the old flagstones down the middle.

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The founding brothers had planted it the year the first roof went on, a seedling carried up from the coast in a cider barrel. Osric had the old ledger in his habit pocket, its pages gone soft as cloth, and the entry for that spring read only: one fir for the wind, to be kept. Nobody had written why. For two centuries the brothers had simply walked around it, the way you walk around a sleeping dog.

He spent the morning with the prior's measuring cord, wrapping it round the trunk and finding the figures wouldn't agree with the plans. Brother Tobias came out from the bakehouse with a saw over his shoulder and a face like a closed door. Osric asked him to wait until after vespers, and to his surprise Tobias did, grumbling, and then climbed the ladder beside him anyway. From the top limbs they could see the whole moor running down to a sea as flat and dull as pewter, and the smoke from the village in long threads that bent east.

That evening Osric took his knife to the bark at the height of his own shoulder, the way the old novices had marked the trees in the orchard, and cut a small notch beside the year. Tobias watched from the step with his arms folded. "The frame goes on the north side, then," he said. Osric nodded and did not look up, because the fir was already dark against the last light, and it seemed to him that it had been waiting for someone to ask.