Black and grey blackwork and dotwork tattoo of three square panels showing a forest, a wooden cabin and a path, running down the inner forearm.

Three forest and cabin panels on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three square panels are stacked down the forearm. The top panel shows tall bare trees and a dark silhouetted figure beside them, the middle panel shows a wooden building with a balcony and stylised smoke lines, and the bottom panel shows a path or planks among trees. Bold outlines are combined with stippled dotwork shading in black ink on pale skin against a black background.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Forest Tree Cabin House Path Silhouette Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chain was still in my hand when the birches opened up, and I counted the stakes twice because counting was the only thing keeping my boots pointed forward. Mr Hale had sent me up from Keswick to draw the boundary of the Carrow estate, three miles of grey-white trunks that all looked the same in the rain. On the third morning I saw a figure standing between two of them, dark as a cut-out, one hand raised as if to take my measure.

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I followed the path she seemed to be keeping, which ran over planks laid across the bog to a cabin with a balcony on its upper floor. Smoke climbed from the chimney in long hooked lines, though nobody answered when I knocked. The door stood open on a table set for two, bread still warm, and a ledger open at a page of surveyed lines that were not mine. Someone had already drawn this land, and drawn it better.

I sat on the balcony rail until dusk with the pencil in my teeth, and at last the figure came out of the trees and stood at the foot of the steps. She did not come up. She only lifted her hand once more, the way you would signal a man across a river, and when I looked down the ground beneath her had become planking, neat and grey, running back the way I had come.

I walked it in the dark. At the edge of the estate Hale met me with a lantern and asked where my chain had gone. I told him it was still out there, pegged true, and that the house in the middle of the wood wanted a surveyor's hand on its ledger. He wrote nothing down. He only looked at my boots, which were dry, and said the path had been there since before the estate, and I should take the other one home.