Black silhouette of a leafy tree with spreading roots, with the word Family and a quote about branches and roots set beside the trunk.

Family tree with roots and quote

Black and grey · Flash

A black silhouette of a leafy tree with branches spreading across the top and roots reaching down the bottom. The word Family sits to the left of the trunk, with a quote about branches growing in different directions while the roots keep everyone together running down the right side. The image is solid black ink on a pale background, with a balanced, centred layout.

Tree Branches Leaves Root Family Quote Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Holm Cross could remember the oak being planted, only that it had always stood at the crossroads with its arms flung out in every direction. When Ada Fenwick came to marry the miller's son, her grandmother pressed a cutting into her hands wrapped in wet sacking. 'Plant it where the roads meet,' she said, 'and mind the roots, for they go further than the branches.'

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So the families came with their spades. The Fenwicks walked down from the moor, the Abbotts came up from the river, and the miller's people had tramped in from three valleys over. Each branch of them wanted the sapling to lean their way. The old men argued about sunlight and the women argued about the spade, until Ada took the cutting from her grandmother's hands and set it in the earth herself, without asking anyone's leave.

Years on, the cousins who had gone to Bristol and the brother who sailed for Halifax still came back each autumn. The tree had grown wild, reaching over the lane in ways nobody had planned, and they picked the apples from its lower limbs and carried them home in their coats. Underneath, where no one looked, the roots had knotted themselves through the stone wall of every farm in the parish.

Ada was buried beneath it in her ninetieth winter, and the lane was shut for the funeral because nobody could agree on which way the hearse should turn. In the end they carried her round the tree twice, once for each side, and nobody complained of the detour.