Black and grey tree of life tattoo on a person's upper arm and shoulder, with family names written across the branches and roots.

Family tree with names on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tree with a full canopy and spreading roots fills the upper arm and shoulder, with names such as Mimi and Poppi, Dad, Mom, Nana and Grandpa, and Abigail written in the branches. Fine, dense linework and stippled shading give the trunk and foliage depth, while the roots extend down the arm. A few lines of printed-style text run along the right side beside the roots, and the piece is entirely black and grey.

Botanical Lettering Upper arm Shoulder Tree Root Leaves Name Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are scraping the last of the porridge from the pan at four bells when the purser lowers the ledger onto the hatch and asks, not unkindly, why the names on the bulkhead are in the wrong order. You wrote them yourself in carbolic ink on the back of a spare chart: Mimi and Poppi at the crown, the uncles beneath them, and your own name last, like a leaf the wind has not yet decided on. The purser taps the lowest line. "Abigail," he says. "She sailed with the Calliope in '31. Nobody else remembers her."

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You remember her. She was the girl who taught you to split a turnip with one clean stroke, who laughed at your seasickness and then shared her ginger. The tree was never meant as a picture of anything but a way to hang people somewhere the damp could not reach them. Every port you crossed, you added a name, and each one ran down the trunk into the roots, where the bilge water carried them off into the dark that the old hands called the hold of memory.

Then the company sells the Calliope for scrap at Gravesend, and the purser says the galley stores go to the breakers with her. You take the chart down and roll it, and in the margin you find the printed lines about wealth and the number of things a man can do without. You read them aloud to the empty galley, to the cold range and the hooks and the stains of sixty years of stew. Then you uncap the pen and write one last name at the very bottom of the page, down among the roots where no branch can reach it, and it is yours.