Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree and birds on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dark, filtered photograph of a forearm with the hand raised at the top of the frame. The black and grey tattoo shows a leafless tree with branching limbs and a few small birds in flight above the wrist. The tree sits on a shaded ground area that fades into roots spreading across the lower forearm.

Blackwork Forearm Tree Bird Root Landscape Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the water came up over Hollin Dale on Tuesday, though the men from the Water Board had been saying Thursday for a month, so nobody had their coats on. I stood on the wall by the chapel with Mrs Pask and watched the lanes go under one at a time. The ash at the bottom of Cutler's Lane was the last thing still above it, bare as a hand, and the rooks were leaving it in ones and twos, going up over the ridge like smoke that had decided on a direction.

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Mr Lowther from the Board asked if we wanted the roots left in the ground when they cleared the stumps for the reservoir. Father always said the roots of a tree hold the land long after the tree is gone, and I told him so, and he laughed at me and wrote something on his clipboard. I did not tell him I had walked those roots as a girl, crossing the dry beck on them and counting steps to the mill.

Father's cottage is in the village, or it was. The removal van will take the dresser and the clock, and I have wrapped the brass bell from the gate in a towel. Mrs Pask says the gravestones go up to the new churchyard on the hill, but the trees cannot be moved, so they will simply stand there, drowned to the shoulders, for the fish to nose around.

I am writing from the lodgings at Ashworth. The window looks onto the new road and nothing else. Come up at Whitsun if you can. I will show you on the map where the ash should be, and you can tell me whether it still counts as a tree if nobody can see it.

Love, Edie