Colour dotwork sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and forearm showing stylised houses, trees and a small bird on a hill.

Village houses and trees sleeve on an arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full arm sleeve shows stylised houses with pitched roofs, tall trees and a small bird, drawn in black linework. The lower forearm houses have scalloped roof tiles and doorways, and dotted stippling adds shading to the trees and hillside. Green, yellow, teal and peach ink fill the motifs, and the design wraps around the arm with the houses at the bottom and the bird higher up.

Dotwork Upper arm Forearm House Tree Bird Hill Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carter reached the top of Hollin Pass with the last of the light and found the village had moved again. There had been eleven houses on the shoulder of the hill that morning and only nine by noon, which was how it went every autumn. The houses wandered down the slope when the frost came, looking for a warmer valley, and the people of Carrow had to climb after them and coax them home before the snow shut the road.

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Tobin, the shepherd's boy, was sent to fetch the one with the yellow tree growing from its chimney. He had not gone far along the goat track when a small dark bird landed on the stones ahead of him and waited, tilting its head, as if it had been told to keep an eye on him. It hopped down the path, always a little in front, until the lower roofs came into view, grey tiles laid in scallops like the scales of a fish, and a green door standing open on the step.

Inside sat an old woman stitching a blanket out of the mist. She did not look up. Houses wander, she said, because they grow lonely for trees and forget that they are meant to stand together. Tobin asked how he could bring the yellow-treed house home. She told him he could not carry it, and he would have to leave something on her step that he could not get back.

He set down the bread his mother had packed for him and walked up the hill with empty hands. When he looked back from the top, the house with the yellow tree was standing where it had always stood, and beside the green door a teal-coloured stone sat where his bread had been.