Black fine line tattoo of three tall pine trees running vertically on the back of a person's ankle and lower leg.

Three pine trees on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three tall conifers of differing heights, with the tallest in the centre and the others to either side. Their trunks are drawn as thin single black lines and the branches are built from dense, ragged black strokes that suggest needles. The design is in black ink only, set against smooth skin and a plain white wall.

Fine line Botanical Ankle Pine tree Tree Conifer Forest

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You wake the oven before anyone else on Kettering Lane, the way your grandmother did, with split kindling laid crosswise and a match held under it until the resin catches. The pine goes up with a crack like a knuckle. By the time the first tray of loaves is shaped, the brick is singing and the back room smells of a forest that has never been within a hundred miles of Wakefield.

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The bundle came from a man who delivers firewood out past the reservoir, three lengths of old timber he swore were sound. You had asked for birch. He shrugged and said the pine was what the frost had left him. You have burned it all week without complaint, though it spits sap onto your forearms and leaves the flour flecked with black.

Tonight the dough won't rise. You stand with your palm on the proving cloth, the window still black, the cold coming off the glass, and you think about the three tall trees the man described from the cab of his lorry, one taller than the others, the two smaller ones leaning in like people waiting for a bus. Then the bell over the door rings, and it is only the milk, and you lift the shutter on the first grey light.

When you pull the loaves out at six, the crust is blistered and dark along the seams, and the crumb opens like a forest clearing. You set them on the sill to cool. Outside, the sky above the car park is lightening from the bottom up, the way a wood does when someone finally opens the door.