Black and grey tattoo design of a bare tree with roots spreading over a hatched skull, with three crows and ink splatter around it.

Bare tree growing from a skull with crows

Black and grey · Flash

A bare, leafless tree grows out of a hatched human skull, with its roots wrapping over the crown. Three black crows are shown in flight and perched among the branches, set against a pale, grungy splatter background. The skull is rendered in fine cross-hatching and the tree in solid black linework, with no colour.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The big top came down on Tuesday, the last of the season, and we've wintered it in the field behind Harrow Lane where the ground is more mud than grass. Mr Gallagher says we'll be back on the road by Easter if the bank in Leeds sees sense, but I stopped believing in anyone's sense about the time the elephant went to a sanctuary in Wales. Nobody cried except Ruby, who is nine and thinks the world ends at the field gate.

The crows came with the frost. Forty or so, settling in the dead ash by the caravans, and every morning they lift off together like someone's shaken a sheet. Dolly the bareback rider says they're the ghosts of every act we ever had. I told her ghosts don't eat the bread crusts Mrs Pryce throws out, and she didn't laugh.

Last Thursday, digging out the old fortune-teller's booth, Tom turned up a skull under the boards. A prop, Gallagher says, from the thirties, with a hole bored through the crown for a candle. Somebody had pushed a sapling into it years back and the thing had kept growing, roots threading out of the eye sockets and over the top like it had been waiting for rain. We left it standing by the gate. I wanted to pull it up, but Ruby wouldn't let me. She said it was the only thing in the field that had stayed put.

Write soon. Tell Mum the cough is better, and don't believe a word I say about the money.

Love, Frank

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