Black blackwork tattoo of a bare tree with a small bird perched on a branch, with shaded foliage at the base, on the inner forearm of a person in a grey satin dress.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree silhouette with a bird on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large black tree silhouette covers the forearm, with bare branches reaching up toward the wrist and a small bird perched on a left-hand branch. The lower trunk widens into dense, shaded foliage and roots that fill the area near the elbow. The image is in black ink only, with solid fills and soft tonal gradations, and the grey dress and dark clothing sit around the tattoo in the background.

Blackwork Botanical Forearm Tree Bird Branches Foliage Root Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the bend at Osier Reach before you learn your father's name for the boat. The willow there has been pollarded so many times it looks like a clenched fist, but the black poplar behind it, the one nobody will cut, throws its shadow across the towpath at four o'clock every afternoon in March. Your mother steers the Marigold past it with one hand on the tiller and the other wrapped round a mug of tea that has gone cold an hour ago.

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The winter the ice came down the Trent, the barge froze to the bank for nine weeks, and you spent them counting branches. A small bird, a wren or maybe a sparrow, lands on the highest bare twig each morning and waits for you to notice it. By February you have named it Mr Abbott, after the lock-keeper, who was also thin and fussed about nothing.

When the thaw comes, the poplar's roots lift the towpath into a long crooked ridge, and the leaves that spill over the water are so dense the fish stop rising under them. Your mother says it is only a tree. You know better than to argue. The council sends a man with a saw, and he stands beneath the trunk for a long time before packing the saw back into his van and driving off without a word.

That evening you make the Marigold fast to the roots, the way the old bargemen used to. In the morning Mr Abbott is on his branch, as if he has been waiting for the rope to be cast off. You untie the knot and let the barge drift out into the current, and you watch the dark crown grow smaller and smaller until the bird is only a fleck against the sky, keeping its place above the water.