Black and grey tattoo of a bare tree with birds flying away from its branches, on the upper back and shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree and birds on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A fine-lined, sketch-like tree with bare branches spreads across the shoulder blade, with several small black birds flying up and away from its top and sides. The shading is light and grey, built from delicate hatching and outlines rather than solid fills. The skin is shown in warm daylight against a wooden fence, with the tree filling the right side of the frame and the birds on the left.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the soup will keep, and you will not hear the end of this if you stand by the urn pretending you are not listening. Look up past the lychgate to the hill. That bare ash has been dead since before the war, yet the parish will not cut it, because Ada Penhallow planted it the morning she was wed and swore it would outlive the lot of us.

Keep reading

Her husband, Tom Gorse, was a carter who could not sit still. Each spring he took his cart to the fairs at Frome and came home with a new song and a bruise, and each autumn Ada stood beneath the ash counting the rooks coming in. One October he did not come home at all. She went on counting for seven winters, and the tree lost a limb to every gale until it looked like a hand raised to ask a question nobody would answer.

Then, the spring she turned sixty, a sparrow with a broken wing dropped onto the lowest bough. Ada bound the wing with lint and a splint of kindling, fed it crumbs from her apron, and when it flew, it went straight up, and the sky above the hill filled with its cousins. Every bird in the parish came to see what the old woman had mended. The tree stood there with its arms open, and nobody had ever thought to ask whether it minded being left.

So there it is. Ada's ash is still bare, and still the birds come back to it, and still we let them go. Now, you two, stop blushing and get up. The tree has done its part. The rest is up to you, and I have never once seen a pair of newlyweds stay put when the church doors are open.

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