Black blackwork tattoo of a branching tree with fine roots spreading from the ankle across the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Branching tree tattoo across a foot

Blackwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot resting on white bedding shows a large black tree tattoo. Thick trunk-like branches rise from the ankle and spread across the top of the foot, splitting into finer twigs and root-like lines that reach toward the toes. The linework is bold where the branches are thick and delicate at the tips, and the design is entirely black ink on pale skin, with the image shot from above.

Blackwork Botanical Ankle Other Tree Branches Root Foot Ankle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reunion was held in the function room above the Crown, which still smelled of the same carpet shampoo, and I spent the first hour pretending not to look at the window. Nobody had told me the sycamore by the old school gate was gone. Dev Hollis told me, halfway through his second pint, as if he were passing on news about the weather.

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We walked down after the speeches, eleven of us in good shoes, past the new houses and the wheelie bins. The stump was still there, a pale circle the size of a kitchen table, its rings so tight near the middle they looked like pencil marks. Somebody had scratched our year's initials into the bark in 1998, and the letters had grown wider with the wood, pulled apart like toffee.

Where the trunk had been, the roots had carried on. They ran under the tarmac of the car park and had lifted a long seam of it, dark cracks splitting off in every direction, fine as hair near the kerb. Dev crouched and laid his palm flat on the ground as if taking a pulse. 'It's still trying,' he said. Nobody laughed.

On the coach home I thought about how we had all grown up under that tree, climbing it, hiding beneath it, and how the thing that had held us there had gone down into the earth without asking anyone. I photographed the cracks on my phone. Later, at the kitchen table, the picture came out blurred, the lines so thin and close together that I couldn't tell which were the branches and which were the roots.