Black bare tree with spreading branches and roots tattooed on the inner wrist, shown in a botanical style.

Bare tree with roots on a wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black tree with bare, spreading branches and a visible root system is tattooed on the inside of a raised wrist. The branches are drawn with fine, tapering lines and the trunk is filled in solid black, giving a silhouette look. The ink is the only colour in the image, which shows a pale background with a blurred shelf and vases behind the hand.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at the Dover desk wanted the roots out in the light, so I unwound the wet sacking one fold at a time while the queue behind me shuffled its feet. It was a switch of ash no taller than my forearm, bare as a winter sketch, with a tangle of pale threads at its base like wet wool. My grandmother dug it from the bank above the lock at Ightham the week before she died. She made me promise to carry it to her sister in Ghent before the sap woke.

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Mr Vance turned the pot under his lamp, a magnifier swinging on a cord at his chest. 'Soil?' he asked. 'None. I rinsed the roots in rainwater.' He tapped the form with his pen. 'Rainwater is not a certificate.' I said the tree had been in our family longer than his forms had existed, which was not a reason, and we both knew it. Behind me a boy was singing about a bus that would not stop.

Then he leaned closer and went quiet. The roots spread across the pot exactly as the branches had spread above the soil, fork for fork, as if the ash had been reaching the same distance in both directions. 'My father had one of these,' he said, not looking up. 'Lost it to the frost.' He stamped the form twice, slid it back under the glass, and said, 'Quarantine, not destruction. Keep it out of French soil.'

I walked out past the barriers with the pot in my lap all the way to Calais, the damp roots pressing against my palms like something still trying to reach the road.

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