Small black bare tree tattoo at the top of the back, just below the neck, on a woman with her hair in a ponytail and a blue-grey off-shoulder top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree tattoo on the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph taken from behind of a woman with her hair tied back in a ponytail. A small black tree with bare, forking branches and a thin trunk sits at the top of the back, just below the neck. The linework is crisp and solid, with no shading, and the background is soft and pale.

Fine line Back Tree Branches Bare tree

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down on that coaming, the pair of you, and mind the wet. You see the ash at the bend below Stanton Lock? Bare as a witch's broom in January, same as it was the winter my father first brought the Marigold through. Every boatman on the Trent knew that tree by its branches, not its leaves, because it never kept many past October.

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Now, there was a lad called Tobias Greave who came up the towpath one December with a paraffin lamp, a sack of onions and no notion where his boat had gone. She was the Patience, and her skipper had moved her on at dusk without him. The lad sat under that ash all night with his back to the trunk, counting the twigs against the sky because he could not bear to look at the water. Nobody counts twigs for fun, I can tell you that.

Come morning the frost had gone white on everything, and he saw the rope scars on the bark, grey rings worn by a hundred years of mooring lines. Every boat that ever tied there had left its mark, and the tree had grown round each one, so it held the whole river's knots in its wood. He laughed out loud at that, and the sound went up through the bare branches like a heron lifting off the reeds.

The Patience came back on the Thursday, her horn going like a cow in labour. He took his onions aboard, and I am told he never once tied up anywhere else. So when you pass that ash, and you will, slow your engine and make your line fast to the old tree for a minute. It has held worse than us.