Colour tattoo on the side of the ribs of a bare tree with roots wrapped in ribbon banners, with a heart at the base and a name on a banner.

Bare tree, roots and heart with ribbon banners on ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A bare tree with spreading branches and exposed roots wraps around the side of the torso, with grey ribbon banners carrying a line of text across the trunk. The roots curl down into a heart outline at the base, which has a further banner beneath it. The linework is black and bold, with brown-red shading on the roots and trunk and grey tones on the ribbons, set against natural skin tone.

Botanical Ribs Tree Root Heart Ribbon Banner Quote Name

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad had the saw oiled and resting on the gatepost before the kettle boiled, which meant the decision was already made and the rest of us were only being told. The old ash on the far side of the Long Field had been lifting the drystone wall for ten years, and that February it stood bare against the frost, its roots pushed up through the stones like knuckles through a glove.

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I took a carrier bag of strips torn from Nan's blue tea towel and walked out there in my wellies. My fingers were too stiff to tie a proper knot, and the bark was wet, so the first ribbon slipped twice. I managed six, high on the branches where the ewes couldn't reach, and I said out loud that the tree had given us everything it could for longer than I had been alive. I felt a fool saying it, but I said it anyway. The cloth caught the thin sun and moved like something breathing.

Dad found me there at dusk. He didn't speak for a while. He put his palm flat on the trunk, the way you'd warm your hands on a cow's flank, and I watched him follow the roots to where they had split the wall and wrapped round a boulder the size of a dresser. Then he picked up the saw and carried it back to the shed, and the next morning the ribbons were still there, stiff with rime.

By May the ash was in leaf, a green so pale it looked like a question. The ewes lambed in its shade, and the tea towel strips had faded to the grey of old newspaper, but nobody had taken them down. Mum still calls it the Ribbon Ash. Dad still says it's a nuisance of roots, and neither of them has tried to cut it since.