Black and grey bare tree tattoo with crows perched in its branches and roots reaching down to a red heart, across the centre of a chest.

Bare tree with crows and red heart on chest

Chest · Mixed · Photo

A bare tree with spreading branches fills the centre of the chest, with four crows perched in the branches and a fifth bird in flight at upper left. Soft grey shading gives the branches and a faint background cloud depth, while the roots spread downward and end at a solid red heart with a few small dots scattered around the base. Black and grey dominate the composition, with the red heart as the single area of colour.

Chest Tree Crow Bird Root Heart Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crows came back to the elm the morning the harbourmaster's wife stopped speaking to the sea. You counted them from the kitchen window of Mrs Pellow's boarding house: four on the bare branches, and the fifth always late, wheeling in from the cliffs as if someone had called it by name.

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Mrs Pellow kept the rules of the house the way the tide kept its hours. Lodgers paid on Fridays, boots stayed on the mat, and nobody went up the lane behind the chapel where the dead elm stood on its ridge. You asked her why in your second week, and she only pressed a cold kettle into your hands and said the roots went down further than the graves.

On the night of the storm you went anyway, lantern swinging, boots full of rain. Beneath the trunk the earth had split, and there in the knot of roots sat a heart of red glass or perhaps only painted stone, glowing faintly where the lamp touched it. The crows did not scatter. The fifth one landed on your shoulder, weighing nothing, and spoke in Mrs Pellow's voice: Put it back where you found it, love, and mind the wet.

You did. By morning the elm was in leaf for the first time in forty years, and the boarding house had one fewer lodger, a man with a bad cough who had paid in advance and left his room spotless. The crows still gather there. Sometimes you count them, and the fifth is always late.