Black and grey botanical tattoo of a bare tree with exposed roots inside a crescent, with falling leaves, on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Bare tree in a crescent on the upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare tree with spreading branches and exposed roots sits inside a large crescent shape, with a few leaves drifting outward on the left and right. The linework is fine and the trunk and roots are built up with soft grey shading that fades into the skin around the crescent. The tattoo is entirely black and grey and is shown from behind against a green outdoor background, with a person's long hair falling over the other shoulder.

Botanical Back Tree Root Branches Crescent Moon Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ash on Gallow Ridge had been bare since Martinmas, and every night the crescent moon hung behind its branches like a bowl nobody had bothered to fill. Nell Dawtry went up the track with a lantern and a loaf wrapped in muslin, because her mother said you never climbed to the ridge empty-handed, and because her younger brother had gone out after the strayed ewes in the frost and the men had stopped searching after the second night.

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She found the roots first, knotted out of the bank like the fingers of a sleeping hand, and sat down among them to eat. 'You're cold,' she told the tree, because it seemed rude not to speak. A leaf came loose from somewhere high and turned over her knee, grey-brown and light as ash, then another, drifting out past the branches towards the moon.

The old woman at the well had said the ash gave its leaves to the night to keep the lost roads lit, and that a tree stripped bare was a tree that had paid for the ridge to stand. Nell pressed her palm to the trunk. It was warm, which surprised her, and beneath her hand she felt the slow pull of roots working deep through the clay, carrying something up towards the cold branches.

She left the loaf at the foot of the trunk and walked home without the lantern, for the moon was bright enough. Her brother was asleep by the hearth, mud to the knees and grinning at her. In the morning she climbed back with a handful of acorns and pressed them into the bare earth between the roots, one for each night she had waited, so that by spring the crescent behind the ridge would be full.