Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a brain with branching root lines running down the upper arm, shown in a close greyscale photo.

Brain with roots on an upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed brain is tattooed on the upper arm, with its gyri drawn in fine stippled dots and outlined in solid black. Thick, branching root-like lines extend from the base of the brain down the arm and spread out near the elbow. The photograph is greyscale and shows a second arm partly visible on the left, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Dotwork Blackwork Upper arm Brain Root Anatomy

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The roots went down into the mud of the Ouse at low tide, and Margery Penhallow swore they had grown another yard since Tuesday. She kept the logbook on the foredeck of the Tern, a narrowboat she had never bothered to paint, and every morning she wrote the same column of figures: depth, colour of silt, number of new shoots on the willow that had been her father's and was now, by all accounts, the river's.

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The tree had no business being there. It leaned out over the towpath at Sawtry Lock with its bark gone the grey of old pewter, and from its trunk the roots ran not into the earth but into the water, pale threads that thickened as they went, branching like the veins on a leaf held to a lamp. Her father had called it a memory tree. He said the river remembered everything it had ever carried, and the roots were how it kept hold of the things the current wanted to take.

In October a man in a wax jacket came asking after a brass plate that had gone missing from the lock-keeper's hut. Margery told him she had seen nothing. That night she sat on the roof with a torch and watched the roots lift and settle in the black water, and she understood, the way one sometimes understands a sum, that they had been drinking from the Ouse for a hundred years and had kept every word spoken over it.

In the morning she wrote in the logbook: plate recovered, depth unchanged, roots unusually quiet. Then she pulled the lever, and the Tern moved off slowly, its wake folding back over the spot where the old tree was holding its breath.