Black blackwork tree with bare branches and a shaded trunk spreading up the inner forearm, with a bracelet on the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree across a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tall bare tree with a dark trunk and many fine branches climbs from the wrist up the forearm. The branches are drawn in solid black lines with stippled dots at the tips, and soft grey shading sits at the base of the trunk to suggest ground. The plain pale wall behind and the dark surface below keep the focus on the tattoo.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Tree Branches Trunk Bare tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had come off the cut in grey plates by the time Nell tied the butty to the mooring ring below Stoke Lock, and the ash on the towpath was still standing, which her father had said it wouldn't be by March. The council men had painted a red cross on its trunk. Nell stood on the gunwale with the rope coiled over her shoulder and looked up through its branches at the sky, which showed through them the way light shows through a fishing net.

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"They'll take it for the new towpath," said Mrs Okafor from the lock cottage, leaning on her gate with a mug. "Sixty years, that tree. Longer than the lock."

Nell didn't answer. Her father had cut his initials into the bark when he was a boy working the same route, and she had never found them, though she'd looked every spring. The branches above her were thin as cracks in a plate, and every one ended in a little cluster of buds so tight they looked like pinpricks of ink.

She went back to the cabin and fetched the old survey book from under the bunk, the one with the water depths in her father's square capitals. On the last page, beside a tally of locks, he had drawn the ash in pencil: trunk leaning, branches reaching east. Under it he had written, Count them in February, see what's still going.

Nell climbed back onto the towpath with a pencil in her teeth and started counting.