Two raised forearms with fine line black tattoos of small bare trees, branches and conifers, one arm with four stacked sprigs and the other with a long, thin branch ending in a fir.

Tree sprigs along both forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are raised with the hands pressed together at the fingertips. The left forearm has four small black tattoos of a bare tree, a twig, a feathery sprig and a conifer stacked down the arm. The right forearm carries a long, thin vertical branch that ends in a fir-like sprig near the lower arm, drawn with fine, delicate linework. The plain blue-grey wall behind gives the black ink strong contrast.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Tree Branch Conifer Sprig Twig Forest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow has the pass shut by the time you reach Hollin Ford, and Agnes Corrie, who keeps the inn, sets a ledger on the bar between the candle and the cold teapot. Its pages are ruled into columns of tree names, each with a date and a Dales farm written beside it. She taps the first entry, a birch, bare in the winter dark, and says the nursery above the lane started with nothing but that one tree and a grudge against the wind. Every spring since, somebody has carried a seedling down to the valley, and every autumn the sprigs come back in the ledger as cuttings for the inn's windows.

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The second night, the power dies and the fire becomes the only clock. Agnes reads you entries by its light: a twig from a hedge that wouldn't stop growing, a feathery larch sent to a widow in Keld, a spruce that went to a christening. Each one is small enough to fit on a fingernail, she says, and that is the trick of it. You can carry a whole forest down a lane in a coat pocket if you're patient and don't mind the mud. Outside, the wind keeps trying the shutters, and you hear it go round the house looking for a way in.

On the last page there is only a long pencil line running from the top corner to the bottom, with a fir sprig drawn at its foot and no name beside it. Agnes says it is the one she has never finished, because the one who planted it never came back down the hill to say where it should go. The thaw comes at dawn, quiet as a closing book. From the bar window you can see the lane running white toward the valley road, and at the far end of it, where the snow stops, a line of young conifers stands dark against the drifts, marking the way down.