Black and grey fine line tattoo of a bare tree with roots on the inner wrist, photographed against a patterned textile.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree with roots on a wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small bare tree with a spreading canopy of thin branches and a root system at its base is tattooed on the inner wrist. The linework is fine and dark, with light shading in the trunk and roots. The photograph is black and white, with a hand resting in the foreground and a busy patterned rug behind it.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Tree Root Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass me the net needle, Dorrie, and mind that lamp, it's been guttering since the tide turned. No, leave the shutter. The boats won't be out in this wind, so you've got me instead of the sea for an hour, and I'll tell you about the tree on the headland while my hands still work.

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Above Skelder Cove there stood a tree with no leaves on it from one winter to the next, black and spread like a fishwife's fingers on a frozen rail. Its roots went down through the chalk and into the cliff face, and the men said you could feel them through the hull when you hauled your gear across the reef. Old Ansel Garrow, who rowed the lifeboat before there was a lifeboat, cut one twig from it every spring and wedged it in his cap band. Never a leaf. Just the twig, and the sap smell in his hair all summer.

The year the herring failed, young Jack Penhale went up the cliff path after dark to pull a line from the lower caves, where the boys swore there was crab worth the climb. The path gave way under him at the bend. His sister Maud heard the chalk go from the shingle and ran up with a lantern, and by the time she reached the bend he was hanging from the roots, one hand locked in the tangle and his boots scrabbling at nothing. She didn't wait for a rope. She wrapped her shawl round the trunk, knotted it, and leaned back into the wind with all her weight until he found his footing on the ledge the roots had kept whole.

Afterwards the tree was still bare, of course. Trees don't owe you a spring. But Maud wouldn't let the men cut so much as a twig from it again, and nobody in Skelder has ever said those roots were only roots. Now hush. That's the bell buoy, and that's a boat coming round the point, and somebody's going to want their supper.