A black ink branching tree tattoo on a man's shin, shown while he sits in a folding camping chair outdoors in a botanical blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dark branching tree tattoo on a shin

Botanical · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A man sits in a folding camping chair on grass, with one leg raised so that a dark tattoo of a branching tree is visible on his shin. The linework is bold and spreads outward in thin, irregular branches, with some areas filled in solid black. The image is in full colour overall, but the tattoo itself is entirely black ink against his skin, and the background includes greenery, a bicycle and part of another person.

Botanical Blackwork Calf Tree Branches Grass Sneaker

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The rowan came through the north wall of Ashcombe keep during the storm on Tuesday, and by Thursday it had split the old masonry like a crack spreading across ice. Pryce has been stomping about the courtyard with a bow saw since breakfast, insisting it has to come down before the tower goes with it. I told him the tower has been leaning since Grandfather's day and the tree is only the latest excuse.

I climbed up yesterday with a flask and the good ladder. From the parapet you can see how the branches have pushed out in every direction, thin and crooked, some of them black with the damp that gets into the mortar. Where the masons bricked up the arrow slit in 1790, the trunk has forced its way through and the bricks lie in the nettles below like dropped teeth. Halfway along the lowest limb a wren has built a nest in a crook no wider than my palm, and she scolded me the whole time I sat there.

The steward's ledger in the library says the Harcourts planted it the year their first son was born. I checked twice, because I wanted it to be a lie, and it is not. So I have told Pryce to put the saw back in the shed and leave the thing to make its own arrangements with the masonry.

Come in June if you can manage it. Bring your boots, and do not let Mother talk you into the back bedroom, which smells of wet plaster and is nothing like it was.

Yours, Nell