Black and white photo of a woman's upper back showing a fine line tattoo of a circular branching tree diagram, placed between the shoulder blades.

Circular branching tree on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair in a bun is photographed from behind, showing a large circular tattoo centred on her upper back. The design is a tree-like diagram made of thin black lines that branch outward from a central point, with stepped right-angled ends around the edge of the circle. The image is black and white, with a plain pale background and a black strapless top at the bottom of the frame.

Fine line Geometric Back Circle Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The drawer for the ground beetles had been sticking since March, so I was on my knees on the lino with the tray balanced across my thighs when Dr Okonedo asked whether I had finished the trace. I had not. The specimens were sorted and pinned and the labels were in order, but the diagram Professor Hale wanted framed above the cabinets still had a gap where the hind-wing groups should have met.

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Hale drew his trees the old way, a root at the bottom of the sheet and everything climbing upwards like a ladder with broken rungs. He disliked it. He said a family has no floor. So we pencilled a circle on the drafting board and let the lines run out from the middle, each one turning at right angles because the set square was the only tool we trusted. The stepped ends looked like stairs leading nowhere. Every genus stopped at its own small landing, and nothing on the circle was older than anything else.

On the last evening I went over the join with a fine nib and found it was not a gap at all. Two lines met where I had expected a fork, and the fork turned out to be one beetle counted twice, once from the northern valleys and once from the southern flats, the way the desert road doubles back on itself past the salt pans. I sat with that far longer than was sensible, then inked the join in and left the circle open at the top, where the afternoon light fell across the paper, so that anyone reading the tree would have to walk all the way round it to find where it began.