Black ink flash drawing of an axe whose handle grows into leafy branches, with two crossed arrows above the foliage, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Axe with leafy branches and crossed arrows

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of an axe head at the top, with its handle running down into a stem that splits into leafy branches. Two crossed arrows and small drop shapes sit across the middle of the handle. The image uses black linework and light hatching on a plain pale grey background.

Botanical Axe Arrow Leaves Branches Stem Tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The axe came off the Morwenna the winter my father's boat went out and didn't come back, and nobody in Porthgwidden would touch it. Tom Penrose said a drowned man's tool carried the sea in its grain, so I carried it up the hill myself, wrapped in an old sail. The head was good Sheffield steel. The handle was ash, pale as a gull's belly, worn dark where his hands had been.

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I pushed the handle butt-first into the bank behind the yard, where the gutter from the loft spilled rain all winter. I meant to dig it out in spring. Instead, in April, two green shoots came out of the wood below the head, then a dozen leaves, then more, spreading down the shaft until the whole thing looked like a stem reaching for the ground. The boys who shot arrows at the gate for gulls swore the sap smelled of birch. I told them nothing. I was busy keeping the rain off the new hull on the slip.

By midsummer the ash had put its roots through the clay and the handle had grown as thick as a wrist. When the new boat needed ribs, I cut a shoot from the lower branches, steamed it, and bent it over the form. It held. Tom ran his palm along the curve and said nothing for a long time, then asked if there was more.

The last rib went in on the first still morning of October. I stood at the stern with my hand on the wet grain while the boat slid off the slip, thinking of the axe still sunk in the bank, feeding a tree that had grown out of the very thing that took him. The boat rode high and true. Water ran down the handle in a single bright drop and fell into the harbour.