Black and grey drawing of a conifer branch running along a spear shaft, ending in a shaded metal spearhead, shown on a white background.

Conifer branch on a spear

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey drawing of a spear with a feathery conifer branch growing from the upper shaft, the needles rendered in dense dark clusters that fade into sparse thin twigs lower down. The steel spearhead at the base is shaded with grey tones to show its faceted surfaces. The design sits centred on a plain white background with no body or skin visible.

Botanical Conifer Branch Spear Needle Twig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind has got teeth tonight, and I will tell it the way my grandmother told it to me, with the lamp turned low so the road cannot see our faces. Between Tabbas and the salt flats there was a hunter named Idris Vell who carried a spear he had bought from a smith in the north, a long thing with a head cut like a fish bone and a shaft of ash. He was walking home from a bad winter when the sand began to sing under his feet, which is how you know the wind has been listening.

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He came to a dry wadi where a single dead tree stood, grey as an old bone, and because he was tired and afraid of the dark, he drove the spear into its trunk to rest his arms. He slept with his back against it. When he woke, the spear had not come out. Its shaft had sprouted green along its length, needles thick as wet hair near the top and thinning to bare twigs where his hand had gripped it, and the steel head had become the ground the roots took hold of. Nobody believes this part, but the men at the well at Hadra will show you the stone where the bark still lies.

Idris pulled, and the tree gave a sigh like a door. So he left it. He walked the road home with nothing in his hands, and every year after, a new branch reached a little further towards the cold country he had come from. Now, when the travellers cross the wadi, they tie a strip of cloth to the lowest twig and ask it for a safe road. The spear is still there, if you look past the needles. Its point faces north, and the tree, I think, is waiting for the hunter to come back and fetch it.