Large black and grey realism tattoo of a bare tree with an owl perched in its branches and a compass rose on a person's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree, owl and compass on a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo covers most of the back, showing a leafless tree with a detailed trunk, spreading branches and exposed roots. An owl sits on a high branch on the left, and a compass rose with an N marking sits to the right of the trunk. The work uses fine hatching and soft shading in black and grey, with the image framed from behind and the subject's face not shown.

Realism Back Tree Owl Compass Branches Root

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had come down on Saltgate market since dawn, and by noon the canvas sagged and the cobbles ran like a brook. Maud Carrow sold her windfall apples from under a sack and did not look up when the stranger stopped at her cart. He wanted a compass. She had one, brass worn the colour of weak tea, and she told him the needle would lie to him on any road that ran past the old elm.

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He laughed and paid her a shilling anyway. He was a drover with a dog that would not walk, bound north past the Hollow, where fog rose off the peat in the evenings and swallowed sheep and lanterns alike. Maud had been that way once as a girl, and she told him what her grandmother had told her: the great bare tree at the head of the Hollow had roots that ran down under the moor to the sea, and an owl that never slept kept watch from its highest bough.

Three nights later he came back soaked to the bone, the dog tucked under one arm. The fog had closed on him at the crossroads, he said, and the needle had spun like a bee in a jar. So he had stood still, as she'd advised. Then the owl called once from somewhere above him, and a line of dark roots showed through the white like stepping stones. He followed them down into the valley and out the other side, and when he turned to look back, the tree stood grey and bare against the moon, every branch pointing home.

Maud took the shilling back and gave him an apple for the dog. He left the compass on her cart before he went, its needle still turning, and she never did find out whether it had ever pointed true on that stretch of road.