Hand-drawn brown ink design of a bare tree with branching limbs and spreading roots, shown on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree with spreading roots

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a leafless tree with a thick trunk, many thin branches reaching outwards and upwards, and a dense network of roots spreading across the base. The linework is fine and hatched, with shading along the trunk and roots that gives it a textured, engraved look. It is rendered in a single dark brown ink on a white background with the tree centred in the frame.

Tree Bare tree Root Branches Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boards of the Lantern Rooms lifted a little every winter, and the committee blamed the damp. Ida Crowther, who swept the place for sixpence a night, knew better. She had watched the men dig out the old oak on the green before the hall went up, and they had given up on the roots, leaving them packed in the clay like a hand that would not open. Now the roots pushed up under the sprung floor in knotted ridges, and whenever the band struck the first waltz the ridges shivered under the dancers' heels.

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Her brother Tom partnered the mill girls on Saturdays and never once looked down. Ida did. She counted the ridges with the toe of her broom and found the place at the cellar stair where the brickwork had split around a root as thick as her arm, pale where the lamp reached it and black where it did not. Nobody had asked the builders what a tree remembers about the ground it came out of, and she supposed nobody ever would.

The hall was to come down in the spring to make room for a bus depot. On the last Saturday in March the committee strung up paper streamers, the mill girls came in their good coats, and the floor sang under them as it always had. Ida waited until the room emptied, then went down the cellar stair with a candle. The root was still there, bare and patient, running through the brick as though the wall had been raised around it on purpose.

She set the candle on the bottom step and laid her palm flat against the wood. Through the boards above she could still feel the last of the band, a slow thrum working its way down into the clay. Whatever the council meant to knock down in the spring, she thought, the oak had got in first.