Black and grey realistic tattoo of a bare tree with a tyre swing and exposed roots, placed on a person's ribs.

Bare tree with tyre swing on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large bare tree with fine, branching limbs and a hanging tyre swing fills the side of the torso, with its roots spreading toward the hip. The linework is fine and the trunk and tyre are built with soft grey shading for depth and texture. A small script line at the base of the roots is included as part of the design, and the image has no colour ink.

Realism Ribs Tree Bare tree Root Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Haddow had the tyre off the lorry before the tide turned, rolling it up the shingle while the boarding house cat walked ahead of her like a foreman. The old elm stood behind Gull Cottage, the only tree for three miles, its branches bare since the salt wind stripped it in the autumn of the great storm. Nobody in Porthgarrow had ever hung anything from it that was not rope.

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Her son Tobias, nine and sulky, held the rope while she knotted it twice around the lowest limb. "It'll drop us in the sea," he said. "Then it'll be a boat," she said, and he laughed despite himself, the first laugh since his father's boat came in without him. The roots had lifted the flagstones of the yard in long grey fingers, and she had asked the council twice to dig them out.

They swung all afternoon. Guests came out of the house with their teacups to watch, and a man in a pinstriped suit tried the swing and nearly took the gatepost with him. By evening the rope had frayed to a hank of fibre, and Tobias was asleep in the tyre's black hollow with one arm trailing toward the roots.

Mrs Haddow found the tin of brass tacks in the dresser and, on the back of an old laundry bill, wrote out the words she had been hearing from the sea for thirty years: we'll all float on. She pinned it to the gatepost and went in to put the kettle on, and the elm, which had nothing left to lose, creaked once and held.