Black and grey tattoo of a bare tree with two crows on the side of the ribs, with a shaded trunk and fine branches climbing towards the chest.

Bare tree and crows on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A bare tree with a shaded trunk and fine, spreading branches runs up the side of the torso, with two crows, one perched on a lower branch and one in flight near the top. The branches are drawn with fine black linework, while the trunk and crow on the perch use soft grey shading for depth. The image is a close side view in natural light, with the tattoo filling most of the frame and a hand with French-tip nails at the upper left.

Ribs Tree Crow Bird Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The second crow had been following the truck for eleven miles before Teodor admitted to himself that it was not going to give up. It sat on the wing mirror at every stop, black as a hole in the glass, turning its head to keep him in view.

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The road ran out at a windmill with no blades. Beyond it stood the tree, a cottonwood gone silver and bare, its trunk split down one side like a loaf left too long in the sun. Nobody on the survey crew had wanted to stop here. Old Abel from the county had told them the crows came in winter and never left, and that a man who cut the tree would find his own name in its bark.

Teodor cut nothing. He set the theodolite on its tripod, squinted through the glass, and wrote the bearing in his notebook: north-north-east, a branch's width off true. When he looked up, the first crow had settled on the lowest limb, and the second was tilting over the cab, drifting down in a slow, deliberate wheel.

He carried the tripod back to the truck and found a line of small pale stones on the tailgate, arranged in a neat arc, as though someone had been counting while he worked. He added one more to the end of the row. The crows lifted together and went west toward the mountains, and the tree was left to the wind and the long white road.