Bare tree tattoo on a forearm

The old ash stood at the bottom of Fenner's field where the drainage ditch bent north. Every December its branches went black against the sky like cracks in a dinner plate. Its roots had pushed under the sheep gate and lifted the flags of the lane until the carts rattled. Mrs Oddie from the lower farm wanted it down for the hay barn, and the man from the council said the roots were in the footings, so the tree was as good as finished.

The winter the frost held for six weeks, a lad called Ivo Sandys came up from the village with a bow saw and a bad temper, meaning to earn the price of a second-hand bicycle. He set the blade to the trunk at dusk. Nell Fenner came out with a lantern and asked him to count the rings before he started. He said he couldn't count rings in the dark. She said then he'd best wait for the light, and she'd sit on the stile until he did.

So they sat there all night, the pair of them, and she told him what her mother had told her: that the ash was the last thing standing when everything else went down to bare earth, and you could judge a hard winter by how far its roots had gone looking for water. Ivo put the saw back in the cart and walked home without a word. In April he returned with a sapling wrapped in wet sacking and planted it in the bend of the ditch, right beside the old roots. The bicycle never came, but the ash has never once been cut.