Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a brown leather boot with yellow laces and a green seedling growing from its top, placed on the upper chest.

Boot with a sprouting seedling on the chest

Neo-trad · Chest · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a brown leather work boot with yellow laces, viewed from an angle with its toe pointing to the lower right. A green seedling with three leaves rises out of the boot's opening, and a small amount of soil is visible inside the collar. The boot is shaded with soft highlights and darker browns, with blue-green accents along the edges and a bold outline.

Neo-trad Chest Boot Leaves Lace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The laces had gone grey with the wet, and Mrs Okonedo at the allotment gate said the boot was no use to anyone now, so Tom Briscoe carried it up the hill under one arm like a loaf he had been asked to deliver. It had belonged to his father, who walked the drovers' road to Kendal every autumn and came home with the mud of three counties ground into the welt. Nobody had worn it since the funeral.

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He set it on the shed bench beside the seed trays. The collar still held a fist of compost from the year before, dry as biscuit crumbs. He meant to tip it out. Instead the rain came in sideways through the open door, and he sat on the upturned crate with the boot in his lap, thinking about how his father never once said where he was going, only that it was past the next wall.

In April a shoot pushed up through the crumbs in the collar. It bent once, like a question, then opened two leaves and a third, the colour of new peas. Tom watered it from a tin mug every evening and did not tell anyone, because there was nothing to tell, only a plant growing out of an old boot in a shed.

By the first week of May he had carried the boot down to the lane and set it on the drystone wall where the drovers' road turned. The rain came on again, and the seedling leaned out over the verge, the way his father used to lean into a steep hill, as if the far side were the only place it had ever meant to be.