Black ink tattoo of a bare, branching tree with small birds perched on the limbs, spanning the upper back in a botanical blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree branches across a back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large black tattoo of a bare tree spreads across the upper back, its thin, twisting branches reaching towards both shoulders. Small birds sit on a few of the branches, and the linework is solid black with some fine tapering at the branch tips. The ink is black only, set against bare skin, with a dark strap crossing the design and a blurred indoor background.

Botanical Blackwork Back Tree Branches Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ash at the edge of Hollow Lane had dropped its last leaf before the banns were read, and by the wedding morning its branches stood bare against the churchyard wall like a drawing left unfinished. Nobody thought much of it. Trees were trees, and Maggie Cole was marrying the miller's boy, which was all anyone wanted to talk about over the ale.

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Old Ruth Harker, who kept the bees, noticed the birds first. They had gathered on every twig, sparrows and wrens and one crow with a notched beak, and none of them flew when the bells started. Edwin Tull walked out under the branches with a jug of cider, meaning to pour the tree a cup for luck. "Ask it nothing," Ruth called from the gate. He asked it anyway.

The answer came down through the boughs in a voice like wind through a loose gate. The tree would bless the marriage if the groom gave it one thing each winter: a branch from his own orchard, cut clean, for the birds to carry off. Edwin agreed, because men agree to things on their wedding day, and he laughed about it all through the dancing.

The first winter he cut nothing. The second, the bird count was lower. In the third, Maggie found him at the gate at dawn with a saw in his hand and no nerve to use it, while the crow with the notched beak watched from the highest limb. She took the saw and cut one clean branch herself. The whole tree shivered and went still, and in April the ash was green to its crown.