Black and grey realism tattoo of a bare tree with spreading branches and roots across a man's shoulder and upper arm.

Bare tree with roots on shoulder and upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo of a gnarled, leafless tree covers the shoulder and upper arm, with branches reaching up over the shoulder and roots spreading down the arm. The linework is fine and the trunk and roots are built up with soft grey shading and dark accents, giving depth and texture. The image is a close phone photograph in warm indoor light, with only the lower face and upper chest of the wearer visible.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Tree Branches Root Bare tree Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad always said you could find Saltmere in the dark by the old ash on Kellow Head, though nobody had seen a leaf on it since before I was born. Its branches stood up black against the sky as if someone had drawn them with a fine pen and then lost interest in the rest of the page. When the fleet came home through the fog, the first thing we looked for was that tree, and the second was the gap of white water beside it where the rocks lay.

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The autumn I turned sixteen, I went out on the Brenda Mae with him for the first time. We ran in at dusk with the wind backing and a sea running over the bar. He had the wheel and his hands were steady, but he kept looking at the headland instead of the water. "There," he said, and I saw it. The tree had come down in the night, its trunk split across the path, its crown hanging over the cliff edge like a hand that had let go.

We got in by the lamp on the breakwater, slow and swearing. Next morning we walked up to look. The trunk lay in the sea below, but the roots had torn out of the turf in a great grey mat, every tendril still gripping a fist of stone and clay. Dad crouched at the edge and laid his palm flat on the soil those roots had held for a hundred years. "Holds the whole bank up, that does," he said. "Take them away and the cliff comes after."

We set a marker pole where the tree had stood, and the boats kept lining up on it anyway. That winter I cut a piece of the trunk, dense and dark, and carried it home to dry on the windowsill. Some nights the lamp throws its shadow across the kitchen wall, a bare tree with its arms spread, and I check it the way you'd check a mark on the water: still there, still steering us in.