Black and grey tree tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder, with first names written among the leaves in script lettering.

Family tree with names on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tree with a shaded trunk, knotted bark and spreading roots covers the upper arm and reaches onto the shoulder. Names in black script lettering sit within the canopy of leaves and branches, and the soft grey shading gives the foliage depth. The tattoo is entirely black and grey and fills most of the frame against a plain background.

Lettering Upper arm Shoulder Tree Name Leaves Branches Root Bark Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind off the Channel had stripped the sycamore in the back garden of Seaview House by the second week of October, so when Mrs Dunning sent me out with the stepladder I knew she wanted the branches tidied before the frost got into the bark. Every lodger who stayed longer than a season was owed a leaf. That was her rule, painted on a board by the scullery door in letters faded to the colour of weak tea. You wrote your name in pencil on a scrap of card, she knotted it to a branch with garden twine, and the tree kept you until you left.

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I had been there since April, sleeping under the attic eaves where the bathroom pipes knocked all night like someone wanting in. I wrote Tobias Rook in capitals so careful they looked like a fence and climbed as high as the ladder allowed to tie it against the grey sky. From up there I could see the whole front of the house, the pier lights coming on in the dusk, and the gaps where old cards had gone brown and blown away.

"Those are the ones who left, I suppose," I said when I came down. Mrs Dunning was at the kitchen window with her hands in the sink. "No, love. Those are the ones who got on with it. The ones who left have their names in the trunk." She dried her hands and pointed through the glass to the knot at the base of the bark, where someone had cut letters deep with a penknife, a whole column of them, the oldest so worn they were only grooves.

I went back out before supper and took a second card from the drawer. I wrote Edwin Dunning in pencil, the way she had described him, and tied it low over the roots where the earth was soft enough to hold a peg. In the morning the twine was still there, and so was the card, damp at one corner and holding.