Black and grey tattoo of an acorn with two oak leaves and the letters ox above it, shaded in soft grey, on the forearm.

Acorn and oak leaves on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded acorn sits above two oak leaves with curled edges, with small handwritten letters ox above the cap. The acorn has a smooth gradient on its cap and a cross-hatched cup, and the leaves are shaded with fine veins and soft grey tones. The design is centred on the forearm against plain skin, with a blurred background.

Botanical Traditional Forearm Acorn Lettering Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, the wind up here has teeth. You want the tale of Garrow's oak, and you'll have it whole, not the bits the innkeeper sells for a penny. The castle at Cold Hollin was already broken when the Lord's last steward came up the hill with his red ox, Dunnock, and a sack of acorns he had no business carrying. He meant them for the pigs through the lean months. He tripped on the gatehouse step and spilled the lot into the nettles.

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Three of them rolled into a crack where the mortar had gone to sand. Nobody thought more of it. The steward was hanged that winter for grain he had never stolen, and the ox went on hauling stone for a tower no one would finish. Years passed and the walls slumped inward. Then one spring a green shoot pushed up between the stones, and the masons who came to clear the place stood looking at it with their hats in their hands.

By the time I was a boy it was an oak that split the gatehouse like a wedge, its roots holding the portcullis by the throat. Every autumn it dropped acorns on the flags, and every autumn the old women swore they heard a red beast lowing at the gate, come for his wages. Foolishness, I told them. But I have watched those leaves curl at the edges like hands raised in surrender, and I have never once seen the stone win.

So when the last tower came down in the great storm, they found the oak standing whole in the rubble, and beneath it a wooden yoke, grey as bone, with one word cut into the wood. Ox. That was the steward's name, the folk say, and perhaps it was. Now hush, and I'll tell you what the acorn is for.