Black and grey realism tattoo of a bare tree with script names among its branches, across the upper back.

Family tree with names on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare tree with spreading branches and a knotted trunk fills the upper back, with its roots spreading at the base. Script lettering in black sits across the branches and trunk, and the shading is soft grey on the bark and limbs. The design is entirely black and grey and is centred on the spine with the lettering spread across the canopy.

Realism Lettering Back Tree Branches Root Script Name Bark

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gather in closer, the lot of you, because the lamps are going out and an old tree doesn't like to be talked about in the dark. You see that oak on the rise above the dodgems? Bare as a bone in February, but count the knots in its trunk and you'll find a name for each one. My great-grandmother Hester cut the first with a penknife the night the travelling lot pulled up in the sleet and nobody wanted to move on.

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The ringmaster then, a man called Lucan Vell with a waxed moustache and a debt to every farmer between here and Maidstone, swore the tree could never hold more names than it had leaves. So each child born on the lot got a branch, and each one who wandered off to the coast got a root that ran down under the caravans and out beneath the hedges. By the time the fair packed up for winter, the canopy looked like a net of scratched writing, and nobody could say whose hand had cut which name first.

Then came the winter Lucan sold the carousel horses to pay his gambling, and Hester's daughter, a girl named Edie Marrow who could not sleep without the organ grinding, climbed the oak to cut her own name lower down, near the roots, where nobody had thought to look. The bark would not take the blade. It bled sap as if it were thinking things over, and she came down with her palms full of resin and the knife still clean in her belt.

So when you walk home tonight past the dodgems, put your hand flat on the trunk where the bark bulges like a knuckle. That is Edie. The tree keeps the ones who stay and the ones who run in equal measure, and the lamps go out on the lot in the same order every year. Mind the roots. They're still growing.