Black ink bare tree tattoo covering the mid and upper back, with branches spreading toward the shoulders in a blackwork style.

Bare tree tattoo across a back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her back to the camera, one arm raised above her head, wears black underwear beside white bedding. A large bare tree with a dark trunk and fine, spreading branches covers her back from the lower spine up towards the shoulders. The tattoo is in black ink with grey tones, set against a plain cream wall.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The show had shrunk to three wagons and a pony that would only walk backwards, and still Tobias Vane raised the striped tent every winter, because the rule of the road was that a tent once raised is never struck empty. The field outside Wexcombe was grey with frost. Nobody had told the lone elm at the field's edge that it was winter. It had no leaves to drop, only a long black frame of branches against the sky.

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Mab, who mended the rigging and spoke to horses more than to people, said the elm had been standing there before the first show and would be standing after the last. She said a bare tree is not dead but waiting for someone to ask it a question. So on the final night of the season Tobias walked out to it with a lamp and a tin of walnut oil, and he asked it plainly how a man keeps a circus alive when no crowd comes to pay for it.

The elm said nothing, as elms do. In the morning the trapeze wire had been rewoven through its lowest branch, and a girl of about nine was sitting on the cart step with a scrap of paper. On it she had drawn the tree in charcoal, every twig of it, with a row of hoops under the trunk. Tobias gave her a penny for the drawing. She said the tree had told her to make it, and she ran off before he could argue.

The next season the show went out with one wagon fewer and one act more. The girl, grown tall, dropped from the crooked upper limb of the elm into a net of rope while the crowd gasped at the bare branches. Mab said that was the answer the tree had given, and Tobias did not argue, because it had not been a bad one.

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