Black and grey tattoo on an inner forearm showing a large tree above a hillside with small buildings, with a line of Elvish-style script beneath.

Tree over hillside village and script on forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a broad, leafy tree on a rounded hill, with small cottage-like buildings and dark rounded shapes along the slope and a tall tower on the right. Below the scene, a single line of angular script sits across the forearm. The shading is soft grey with fine outlines, and a few faint pink tones appear in the tree canopy, while the rest of the ink is black and grey.

Forearm Tree Hill Tower Script Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tree had stood on Brackley Knoll longer than anyone in Thimbleby could say, and every spring the carpenter's widow climbed up with a pot of ochre to mark the trunk where the new lambs were born. That was the custom, and Edith Falk did not see why her son should be excused it just because he had gone to the mill town and come back with ideas.

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"It's only letters," Tom said, leaning on the gate. He had a roll of paper under his arm, covered in the hooked, angular script his grandfather had taught him from a book with a cracked spine. "Nobody reads them. That's rather the point."

She said nothing. Below them the cottages sat in their hollow like loaves left to cool, smoke leaning off their chimneys, and beyond them the old stone tower on the ridge stood with its one lit window, where the miller's sister kept the bells. The valley had always been a place where things were kept rather than read.

Tom unrolled the paper against the trunk and weighted its corners with stones. The letters ran in a single line, the same height as the lowest branch. When Edith finally took the pot and the brush, she found the ochre would not take on the bark, so she wiped the wood with her apron and tried again, and this time the mark went in dark and steady. "There," she said. "Now the tree knows its own name." Tom laughed, and the hill, which had heard a great deal of foolishness in its time, let him.