Black and grey realism tattoo of a tall pine tree with layered branches running up the inside of a forearm.

Tall pine tree on the inner forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tall pine tree with a bare trunk and layered clusters of foliage runs the length of the forearm, with the crown reaching towards the elbow. The linework is fine and the foliage is built from soft grey shading and dark accents, giving depth and a realistic, drawn-from-nature feel. The subject is set against plain skin and a pale wall, with a dark top and jeans visible at the edge of the frame.

Realism Forearm Pine tree Tree Forest Branches Foliage Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The men from the estate had painted the tall pine with a band of orange at dusk, and by morning the whole ridge knew it was the last one that would not go for pit props. Old Hamish Rennie climbed the stile anyway, a flask in his coat and his grandson's penknife in his pocket, and sat there until the foreman came up the track to ask what he thought he was doing.

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"It was my father's," he said. "He put it in the year the mill shut, when there was nothing else for his hands to do. Three hundred yards of seedlings in rows, and this one he let grow crooked on purpose, because the wind on the top was too much for a straight stem." The foreman, who was twenty-six and had a van that needed diesel, looked at the trunk, bare for forty feet, and then at the crown catching the early sun like a torn umbrella, and did not argue.

They left it. The rows came down one winter at a time and the stumps were ploughed under, but the crooked pine kept shedding cones onto the flagstones of the old wall, and the jays came to strip them. Hamish died in February with frost on the gate. His grandson, who had given up wanting to be a surveyor, came up with a sack and a tin of sheep dip to paint the trunk, and found the orange had weathered to nothing and the bark where the penknife had once scored a crude H had healed smooth.

He pressed a cone into the soil at the foot of the trunk, the way his grandfather had taught him to start a row, and walked back down without looking up. The tree was tall enough now that it did not need him to watch it.