Black and grey bare tree with roots running from thigh to calf, with a red and blue knight on horseback in a medallion at the lower calf, in botanical style.

Bare tree and mounted knight down a leg

Botanical · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A large bare tree with twisting trunk and branches climbs from the calf up over the thigh, with small falling leaves scattered beside it and roots spreading down towards the ankle. The trunk and branches are shaded in black and grey with fine linework, while a medallion at the lower calf shows a knight on horseback in red, brown, blue and gold. The leg is photographed full length against a plain green wall, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Botanical Traditional Thigh Calf Tree Branches Root Leaves Horse Shield Cross Medallion

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had turned the Thursday market to brown soup by eleven, and Edwin Pell was still hunting for a buyer for the shield. He spread the wax cloth over his trestle and laid the thing out like a landed fish. Red paint had flaked from the rim where a thumb had rubbed it for three centuries, but the gold cross still caught the light from the pie stall opposite.

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He had bought it from a widow in Lower Ashby for two shillings and a promise to fetch her husband's watch from the menders in town. The clockmaker had kept the shield behind the cuckoo clocks. She said it had come out of a hedge after a gale, with a bough still caught in its strap. The knight on it rode hard across a field of coiled roots, his lance snapped halfway, and the horse's eye was painted so wide it looked frightened of its own rider.

A woman in a yellow mac stopped and tapped the rim. "Doesn't look like a saint to me," she said. "Looks like he's lost the way." Pell wanted to tell her the knight was never lost, only carrying something he had been sent to bury, but she had already moved on to the jam jars, and water was running off the brim of his cap in a thin, steady line.

At dusk he packed up with the shield still unsold. Halfway home he stopped at the old ash on the bend, where the roots had heaved the verge into a bank. Someone had tied a paper tag to a low branch, a price in pencil that had run in the wet. He read it twice, then lifted the shield out of the cloth and leaned it against the trunk, facing the way the roots ran, where it would stay dry until morning.