Black ink bare tree tattoo with spreading roots across a person's back, seen in a mirror selfie.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree tattoo across a back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare tree with thin, branching limbs rises from the upper back and its roots spread down towards the lower side of the back. The design uses dark black linework with solid filled areas on the trunk and roots. The warm-toned phone photo is taken in a mirror, with a black garment and a laundry basket visible in the background.

Botanical Back Tree Bare tree Branches Root

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The orchard at Hollin Cross had been dead for two winters when Maud Pennick walked up the lane with a spade over one shoulder and her father's cider jug under the other arm. Nobody in the village expected her to dig out the old pear tree by the wall, least of all the tree. It had split down the middle in the frost and its branches hung like a hand that had forgotten how to close.

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She worked through the morning with the stones piling beside her. Under the first foot of clay the roots came up pale and knotted, thicker than her wrist, and they went on and on, spreading down the slope towards the brook as if the tree had been reaching for water all its life and only now had she thought to ask where it went. By noon her palms were raw and she sat on the wall to drink, watching the sun slide behind the church.

That evening the miller's boy came by with a message from the bailiff, and he stopped at the gate to stare at the bare trunk she had left standing. He said it looked like it was holding its breath. Maud told him to mind his manners and go home. Then she went inside, found the old ink pot her mother had kept for labels, and sat by the fire mending the broken branch with thread, the way her grandmother had once mended a torn sail.

In spring the pear did not bloom, but the roots she had left in the ground put up a single green shoot, and the boy swore it was the first thing in the lane to turn.