Branching tree tattoo across a back

Nobody had planted it. It came up through a crack in the car park the year the builders poured the foundations, a thin grey stick with two leaves and a great deal of nerve. The men with the saws came on a Monday. Old Ruth Abara stood in front of the trunk in her slippers, a kettle in one hand, and told them the tree had been there before the bricks and would be there after. They went away for their tea and never came back.

So it grew. Sixteen storeys of people looked out at it, and it looked back, reaching up past the railings and spreading its arms across the fifth-floor balconies until the children could reach a branch from their windows. In winter it stood bare and black against the sky, every twig drawn as fine as a pen line, and the old men said you could read the weather in it the way you read a letter.

When the council finally came with the paperwork to knock the whole block down, the tree was the first thing the surveyor measured. He wrote down its height, then its girth, then sat on the bench beneath it for a long while without writing anything else. The block stayed. Ruth's grandson still climbs the lowest branch on Sundays, and if you stand in her old bedroom at first light, you will see the tree's shadow thrown across the white sheets, every branch spread out as if the whole building had finally been allowed to breathe.