Black and grey bare tree tattoo with a thick trunk and spreading branches covering the upper back and shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree across a back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a large bare tree tattoo across a person's upper back, with the trunk rising from the lower left and branches spreading over the shoulder blade. The linework is bold and sketchy, with stippled shading along the trunk and fine branch detail toward the edges. The black and white photo is cropped to the back and shoulder, with no face visible.

Botanical Back Tree Branches Bare tree Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind had stripped the last leaves off the elm above the harbour by Tuesday, and by Wednesday the fleet was still out past the Mouse, four boats where there should have been five. Ruth stood at the top of the slipway with a flask going cold in her hand and watched the branches scratch at a sky the colour of wet slate.

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Her brother had climbed that tree every summer until he grew too heavy for the lower limbs. He used to say the elm was the only thing in Porthkerris that never asked him to come in early. Its trunk split into a dozen arms, and each arm split again, until the crown looked like a chart of every creek on the coast, a net thrown wide and snagged on the weather.

The Morwenna came round the point at half four, low in the water, her hull scraped pale along one side. Dennis Hook was at the wheel. Ruth did not run down the slip. She walked, the way you walk when you have already decided what your face will do, and counted the men on deck. Four. Then a fifth came out of the wheelhouse with a coil of rope over his shoulder, and she let out a breath she had been holding since Monday.

She climbed the bank to the elm afterwards, when the boats were tied up and the men had gone to the Ship for something hot. Every branch was still pointing home, bare and stubborn, reaching up into the dark as if it had never once been asked to let go.