Black ink tattoo of a bare tree with spreading branches and roots on a forearm, shown against a dark blurred background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree with roots on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a leafless tree with a thick trunk, many fine branches reaching up and out, and a root system spreading across the base of the limb. The linework is dense and detailed, with shading along the trunk that gives it some depth. The image is entirely black and grey, with the tree filling most of the frame against a dark, out-of-focus background.

Botanical Forearm Tree Branches Root Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ash at the bottom of Marjorie Penhale's garden had stood bare since the March gale, and by November the council men were leaning on their saws at the gate, waiting for me to sign. I had come up from the allotments with a flask to tell them no. Marjorie had planted it the year her husband left, she said, one whip from a nursery in Ludlow, and she had watched it grow taller than the chapel roof without once asking it for anything.

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"It isn't dead," I said, which was not true, and she knew it was not true, so she handed me a trowel instead. We knelt on the wet grass and dug along the bank where the roots had pushed up through the clay like the veins on the back of an old hand. They went further than I expected. Every time we thought we had reached the end, a finer root turned sideways and ran under the lawn toward the pond, thin as cotton and black where the soil had soaked it.

By dusk we had cleared a ring as wide as a cartwheel and found nothing rotten at the heart. The wood was pale and sound, and the sap, when I nicked it with a thumbnail, was still cold and quick. Marjorie sat back on her heels and said her husband used to call the tree a liar, because it promised everything in summer and gave nothing back in winter. I told her the roots were the honest part. She laughed until she coughed.

I went back the next morning with a bow saw and cut only the dead top, the three crooked limbs the gale had snapped. The rest I left standing, all those bare fingers pointing at the sky. In April the buds came out along the trunk where I had made the cuts, small and green as pennies. Marjorie rang to tell me, and then she asked me to bring the trowel back, because she wanted to plant bulbs under the tree and needed to know where the roots ran.