Black ink drawing of a bare tree with spreading branches inside a brushed enso-style circle, with ink spatter at the base, shown on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree inside a brushed black circle

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bare tree with thick trunk and fine, branching limbs fills the upper centre of the design. A thick, brushed black circle partly encloses the tree, and ink spatter spreads across the lower right. The work uses solid black ink and fine lines on a plain white background, with no colour.

Blackwork Tree Bare tree Branches Circle Ink splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pass above Greywater had one tree on it, and it had been dead for as long as anyone's grandmother could remember. Nobody cut it down. The shepherds said it would be unlucky, and the carters said it would not burn, which was true enough, because Tomas Hebb tried it once with a tar rag and his lamp went out before the wood caught.

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The winter Ines Corrow came up the pass with two goats and a broken cart wheel, the snow had already closed the track below the tree. She sat under its bare limbs to wait for the thaw and drew a circle in the frost with the end of her stick, slow and round, because her father had taught her that a circle closes what is open. The circle did not quite meet. She left the gap for the wind to come through.

Something answered from the trunk, a knock like knuckles on a door. Ines looked up and saw that the bark had split in a long black arc, and a man stood in the gap, shaking ink from his sleeves as though he had been painting the sky all night. 'You broke my circle,' he said. 'I only meant to finish it.' She offered him the heel of her bread. He took it, and in return he told her the snow would slide off the branches before dawn, which it did.

In spring the carters found a circle drawn fresh in the mud at the foot of the trunk, its gap closed, and a goat's bell hanging from the lowest branch where the tree had never before put out a bud. The bell still rings when the wind comes off the pass. The old shepherds say the tree is finished at last, though nobody has yet seen a leaf.