Fine line black and grey tattoo of a treeline with birds in flight on the inner forearm, shown against a dark top.

Treeline and birds on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A row of slender, leafless trees stands on a faint horizon line, with a few small birds flying above them. The linework is fine and sketchy, with shading built from loose hatching that gives the trees depth and a soft, misty feel. The design is entirely black and grey and wraps diagonally across the forearm, with the trees most dense in the centre and fading toward the edges.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Tree Bird Landscape Forest Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the kingdom of Hollin Mere, the old wood along the river was called the Thinning, because each winter it gave up a few more trunks to the charcoal burners and the shipwrights of the coast. Ysolt kept the ferry at its edge. She was known for her patience and for her habit of counting things under her breath while she poled, gulls and fence posts and the rings on her fingers.

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One November the king's surveyor came down the towpath with a measuring chain and a list. He asked her how many trees were left between the water and the hills. Ysolt said she did not count trees. She counted birds, because birds went where there was shelter, and the number over the wood told her how much wood there was. The surveyor laughed and wrote it down anyway, in the margin, beside the word timber.

Every morning after that she rowed out before the mist lifted and counted rooks and starlings and the little brown finches that nobody else bothered with. In spring the number rose. In autumn it fell, but never as far as the year before. The surveyor came back each season, grumbling, and each season his chain would not reach across the grey tangle of trunks that stood in the mist like a line of sentences nobody had finished.

In the last year of her ferrying, the king's men came with axes and a clear order. Ysolt met them at the water and asked them to count first. They did, gave up at forty, and went home. The wood stands there still, thinner at the ends and thick at the middle, and when the river fog comes up at dusk the birds go in over it one by one, which is how the boatmen know the Thinning has not yet been finished.