Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a tree stump cross-section with concentric growth rings and pale radial cracks, shown on a forearm in three stacked photographs.

Tree ring cross-section on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three stacked photographs show the same tattoo of a tree stump cross-section, with dense concentric growth rings radiating from a central point. The solid black outer bark and the fine white lines of the rings and cracks create strong contrast, and the rings tighten towards the centre. The design fills most of the frame, and each panel is shot from a slightly different angle on the skin.

Blackwork Forearm Wood Bark

Find an artist for this

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

The lorry had shed its load of juniper logs at the bend where the tarmac gives out, and I was the only one who stopped to look at them. Forty miles of nothing either side of the Sallow Wells road, and somebody had dragged a cut trunk onto the gravel as if it were waiting for a buyer. I walked round it with my hands in my jacket pockets. The bark had split in long grey plates, and under it the wood was pale as bread crust, the rings running out from the heart like ripples off a stone dropped in a stock tank.

Keep reading

My father taught me to count them with a matchstick, tapping each line so the tally stayed honest. He reckoned every ring was a wet year and every thin one a drought, and that a tree kept a ledger nobody else could read. I tried it on that log, starting at the bark, and I lost count past two hundred because the lines pressed so close near the centre that they blurred into one grey hum. The cracks ran out to the edge like the spokes of a wheel someone had driven over.

A woman in a sun-faded Ford pulled up behind the logs and asked if I was the one from the council. I said I was nobody. She said the juniper had come off a fence line near the old tank, and the fence had been put in, then pulled out, then put back in again, and nobody could agree who had paid for it. She laughed and said the tree had seen the whole argument coming.

I stayed until the light went amber on the rings. Then I pressed the matchstick into the central crack, where the growth was tightest, and left it standing there for whoever came next to count the years I had not been able to.