Black and grey pen drawing of a bare, gnarled tree with exposed roots and a flock of birds lifting off from its branches, a tattoo design on a plain background.

Bare tree with roots and flying birds

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A bare, twisted tree with a thick trunk, spreading branches and a wide network of exposed roots, with a flock of birds rising from the upper right. The linework is fine and dense, using crosshatching and stippled hatching to build texture in the bark and roots, while the birds are solid silhouettes. The drawing is entirely black ink on white, with the tree centred and the birds balancing the composition to the upper right.

Botanical Tree Root Branches Bird Flock Bark

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the fire doesn't take your sleeves. No, Tom, it was not the oak that was struck. It was the ash beside it, the one with the crooked neck that leans over Hobb's gate, and the lightning opened it to the root in one clean stroke. Everyone in Wexcombe came out to see. The smoke smelt of pennies.

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The thing about a tree that old is that it does not die all at once. It goes up into its branches first, like a man climbing a ladder with his coat already on. By the second winter the leaves had stopped coming, and by the third the rooks had moved into the top limbs, and the wind began to carry the little birds out of the hedgerows and set them down in the bare crown, where they sat in the gloom and called to one another across the common.

Agnes Pell, who kept the bees and had no patience for anybody's grief, went up the hill one February with a spade and a loaf of bread. She dug down to where the roots ran under the wall, and she found them still breathing, fat and pale and furred with frost, running off in every direction beneath the village like the lanes on a map. She put the loaf in the hole. She did not say why. Then she filled it in and walked home.

The birds rose the next morning, every one of them from the parish hedges, and they wheeled up over the hill and settled in the crown as if it were still in leaf. Then, one at a time, they lifted off and scattered over the valley, and not one came back to the same branch twice. Agnes said that was the tree's doing, not theirs. Hobb's gate still leans. The ash is still standing, grey as a chimney, and every spring somebody in Wexcombe swears the roots have crept a yard closer to the church.