Colour botanical tattoo of a blossoming tree with exposed roots and a banner reading Family, across the ribs on the side of the torso.

Blossoming tree with roots on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A large tree rises from roots that curl around the lower side of the torso, with branches of blue blossom and green leaves spreading up towards the upper ribs. The trunk and roots are shaded in browns with soft highlights, while the blossoms and leaves use blue, teal and green ink, and a scroll banner with the word Family sits at the base. The design is shown in a clear side view with the skin evenly lit.

Botanical Ribs Tree Blossom Leaves Root Banner Flower Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Ashby Ferrers would cut the old damson at the bottom of Mardle Lane, though it had been dying since my grandfather planted it the year the railway came. Its blossom came out blue, a colour Dad said the Hollis women had always carried in their hands, and every spring the council sent a letter about the wall it was pushing over, and every spring Mum read it at the kitchen table and fed it to the range.

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The winter I turned nineteen, the roots lifted the cellar floor clean out of true. Our Tom had a builder from Leicester coming up on the Saturday train to look at the plot, and he stood in the yard with his hands in his coat pockets, saying it was only a tree, Ruth, only a tree, and wasn't it time we were sensible. I didn't argue. I took the spade down the cellar steps instead and started digging where the roots came through the clay.

They had wound themselves round an old biscuit tin, rusted at the seams, the way you'd wind wool round a thing you meant to keep. Inside were the christening cards, a lock of hair in tissue, and a list in Grandad's square hand of every Hollis who had ever lived under that roof. Tom came down to see what the noise was and went quiet over the list. Neither of us said the obvious thing, which was that the roots had been holding the tin shut for forty years.

We didn't sell. In April the blossom came out first on the lowest branch, over the gate, and Tom and I sat under it with the tin open on my knee, reading out names until the light went.