Back view of a man with a solid black cedar tree tattoo centred on his upper back, in a tattoo studio with flash sheets on the walls.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cedar tree on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a man seen from behind, with a solid black cedar tree centred between his shoulder blades. The tree has a layered, tiered canopy built from dense black silhouette shapes on a trunk, with some softer grey and reddish tones around the lower edges of the ink. The background shows tattoo studio walls with a tips sign and colourful flash artwork, and the head and face are not visible.

Back Tree Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mules had stopped twice already, and Nadia knew the third time would be the one that counted. Snow was coming off the col in thin sheets, and the path beneath it had vanished an hour ago. She kept the lead rope short in her fist and looked for the cedar, the only thing on this side of the pass tall enough to show through the white.

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Her grandfather had planted nothing in his life, but he talked about the tree the way other men talked about a debt. Seven tiers of branches, he said, one for each stage of the descent to the spring at Oshen Hollow, each shelf as wide as the one below so that a man walking with his eyes shut could count his way down. She had laughed at him for it at twelve. Now she counted the dark layers rising out of the drift, one, two, three, and the mules leaned into the slope as if they had been counting too.

At the fifth tier the wind dropped. The black shapes sat flat and stacked against the sky like the cut-out layers of a paper lantern, and between two of them she saw the older bark of the trunk, scored by a century of hands that had also needed a sign. She tied the mules to the lowest bough, where the needles were dry, and went on alone down the bank with her boots sliding.

The spring was under a flat stone, exactly where he had said, and the water was warmer than she expected. She knelt, pressed her palm into it, and felt the cold go out of her wrist. When she looked back up the slope the tree was only a shadow again, but she knew its shape well enough to find it in the dark, and she waited there until the mules came down the last tier one by one.