Black and grey realism tattoo of a bare tree with birds flying across the chest, shoulder and upper arm.

Bare tree and birds across shoulder and arm

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A bare, windswept tree with long branches and exposed roots covers the upper arm and shoulder, with soft grey clouds shaded behind it. Three birds fly across the upper chest towards the tree, drawn in solid black silhouette. The work is black and grey, using fine branch linework and smooth, blended shading in the sky and clouds.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Chest Tree Branches Root Bird Cloud Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind had been working at the spoil heap since before dawn, and Mari Dyer could hear it rattling through the last ash tree above Coedpen like a man testing a gate he meant to open. She pulled her coat tighter at the top of the lane and looked down at the pit wheel, its headgear still and grey against a sky the colour of wet slate.

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Her father had never planted anything up there. The tree had been sown by a jay, he said, the year the first shaft closed, and it had grown lopsided and bare, leaning east as if it wanted to leave. Its roots had split the old tramway and come up through the cinders in knuckled fingers. Nobody had ever cut it down. The village had its reasons and kept them to itself.

Three crows came in low over the rail bank, black as cut paper, and she counted them as they passed, the way her grandmother had taught her to count magpies. They dropped one by one into the upper branches and settled there, folding themselves against the gusts. Mari watched them for a long time. Then she took the envelope from her pocket, the one from the Coal Board that had come on Tuesday, and tore it neatly in half.

She walked down the lane without looking back. Behind her the branches creaked and the crows lifted together, heading for the open sea beyond the coast road and leaving the tree to hold its ground alone on the heap. Below, the lamps came on one by one in the terraces, and she thought, for the first time in months, that she might stay.