Black ink bare tree with small perched birds on the calf, photographed against a wooden floor.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree with birds on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A bare, leafless tree with thin branches and a trunk sits at the centre of the image, with several small birds perched on the branches and one flying above. The linework is solid black with no shading, and the tree reads as a simple silhouette. The photo is taken close up from above, with the tattoo centred on a pale lower leg against a wooden floor.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tree on Hollin Row had been dead for nine years when the birds began to settle in it. Nobody in the village could say where they came from. Old Mrs Pratt, who kept both the chapel key and the bread ovens, said they were the same birds that had perched there when the tree was green, come back to keep an eye on the men.

Keep reading

Every morning at ten to six the colliers walked under its branches on their way to the drift mouth, boots loud on the setts, lamps swinging at their belts. Ruth Dunning's father was among them the morning the roof came down at Number Four. She stood at the gate with her brother and counted the birds on the bare wood. There were seven. She counted again and there were still seven, and her brother said that was one too many for a shift, so she slapped him for saying it.

They waited by the tree all day. The birds did not sing. At dusk the rescue cage came up with three men on it, grey as ash, and Ruth's father was the third. The birds lifted together and went off over the pithead wheel towards the hills, all but one, which settled on the highest branch and stayed there.

Mrs Pratt said that one would keep its place as long as there was anyone left under the ground. Ruth went back to the tree every morning after that, and every morning the bird was still there, watching the gate.

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