Black and grey tattoo of a bare tree growing from an open book with small birds in flight, placed on the upper back beside the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree growing from an open book on a shoulder blade

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare tree with spreading branches grows from the pages of an open book, with three small birds flying off to the left. The linework is fine and the trunk and branches are shaded in soft greys to give volume, while the book has darker outlines and page detail. The tattoo sits across the upper back near the shoulder blade, photographed in natural light against a dark background.

Fine line Back Tree Book Bird Branches

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the one who sits down beside it, because on Tuesday the signal failed, the 6.12 was cancelled, and the only other passenger has gone off to find a taxi. The book lies open on the bench at platform two, its pages curling in the drizzle, and nobody has claimed it. Mrs Hadley from the tea kiosk says it belongs to whoever is still waiting, so you read the first line aloud to the empty shelter, just to hear something other than rain on the tin roof.

Keep reading

The story concerns a tree that once stood beyond the goods yard, before the line was widened and the men with saws came. Its roots went down under the platform and never quite left. By the third chapter the wind has changed, and a thin grey trunk is pushing up through the page between your thumbs, bare branches opening over the timetable like cracks in a windscreen. You stop reading. You look up. Three small birds lift off the signal gantry and head west over the water tower, exactly as the old engraving on the endpapers promised they would.

The guard comes along at half past seven with his lamp and finds you still on the bench, a twig resting across your knee like a bookmark. He doesn't ask. He says the replacement bus is waiting at the gate, and that the book ought to stay where it is, because whoever reads the next page will need somewhere to sit. You close it gently. The tree shivers, sheds one last dry leaf onto the platform, and goes still.