Black and grey botanical tree tattoo with ink-wash branches across the upper back of a woman in a red open-back dress.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black ink tree across a woman's upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind, with one arm raised to her head, shows a tree tattoo across her upper back. The branches and trunk are drawn in fine, broken black lines with heavier dark ink at the trunk and soft wash-like shading. The bare skin and red dress make the black ink stand out against a plain grey background.

Botanical Back Tree Branches Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

They held the reunion in the old village hall the year the ash by the playground was cut down. Nobody had planned to talk about the tree, but Edith Carrow brought the old register, and when she opened it at the back there were thirty-one names in faded brown ink, and beside each one a small drawing of a branch.

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Her grandmother had told it plainly, the way she told everything. When the school was built, the children planted a sapling in the corner of the yard, and the teacher, Miss Dunning, made each of them promise one thing they would never tell their parents. The tree took the promises and grew them into its limbs. Anyone who kept their word stayed in the shade of it. Anyone who broke a promise had a branch go dark and drop in winter, and the wood was carried home for the stove.

The men at the table laughed. Then Thomas Rudd, who had gone to sea and come back with little to show for it, put his finger on his own name and said quietly that he had never told anyone where he hid his father's watch. Nobody asked what he meant. They looked at the drawings, and at the one beside his name, which had been drawn bare, and understood that the tree had been waiting for him to say it.

He went out into the yard in the dark, and the others followed with torches. The stump was still there under the grass, and a thin green shoot had come up through the roots. He knelt and dug with his hands until he found the watch wrapped in oilcloth, its glass cracked but its hands still moving. He held it up to the light. Edith wrote the date beside his name, and in the drawing the bare branch put out a single leaf.