Black and white line drawing of two olive branches with hatched leaves and olives, crossing at the centre, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed olive branches design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two olive branches spreading outwards from a crossed point at the centre, each carrying narrow leaves and several olives. The olives and leaves are shaded with fine parallel hatching and cross-hatching, with clean outlines on a plain white background. The design is entirely black ink on white, with a symmetrical, horizontal composition.

Botanical Leaves Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp is nearly out and the wind off the Medway doesn't care for old men's throats. No, you can't have the last of the peppermints, they're for the horse. Where was I? Ah, the two branches. Listen.

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The Pellegrino Brothers and the Vance Family had shared the same winter ground at Hollow Meadow for forty years, and for thirty-nine of them they had not shared a single word. One family walked the wire, the other swung from the trapeze, and every spring they fought over the same patch of mud by the river. When the big top began to sag that last November, its canvas patched like a drowned gull, neither troupe could afford a new tent. The council of ringmasters, a sorry handful of men, sent word that whoever lost the field would go to the workhouse at Maidstone.

Old Tomasina Vance came across the mud on the first frost with a sprig of something grey-green in her fist. It was olive, cut from a pot she had carried since her grandmother's day, the one thing she had never sold. She found Enzo Pellegrino mending a rope with his teeth and held the branch out without a word. He looked at it for a long time. Then he took a sprig of his own, a little bent, and crossed it over hers the way you'd cross two swords, and the two of them stood there with their branches making a letter X in the frost.

That was all it took, though the whole ground swore to its dying day there had been shouting. By spring the families were sharing the wire and the trapeze and one blue tent, and the olive trees they planted at the river's edge still stand, grey and crooked, where the posters used to be nailed.

So when you ask me why we never sold the big top, child, it is because the mud is still ours, and the branches are still crossed. Now go and fetch the horse his peppermint.