Back view of a woman with her hair in a bun, showing a small black fine line pine tree tattoo centred on her upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line pine tree on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A slender, leafless-looking pine tree rises vertically between the shoulder blades, drawn with delicate single-needle linework and sparse branches. The tree is rendered in black ink with light shading only in the lower trunk, against pale skin and a white wall. The composition is centred and minimal, with the subject's black scoop-neck top framing the design.

Fine line Botanical Back Tree Pine tree Conifer Woman

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the kettle, because this is the part where the road turns to dust and the old men start lying. You will want the true bit, so I'll give you the tree first. Out past Corrin Wells, where the tarmac gives up and the sand comes across it in tongues, there stood one pine. Nobody planted it. The surveyors who laid the road swore it had been there longer than the road, a single straight stem with its branches thinned out like a comb missing teeth, and every driver who passed it said the same thing: it looked as if it were listening.

Keep reading

Lorna Spake drove a fuel lorry up that stretch for twenty-two years. She told my sister she stopped every Tuesday at the pine, not for water or for the toilet, but to touch the bark where somebody's penknife had scored a ring long before either of them was born. She said the tree grew a needle for every mile of road that had ever been driven past it, and that if you counted them right, you knew how far you had left to go.

Now, I have counted. I will not tell you the number, because a number is a thing a man keeps to himself. What I will tell you is that the spring the flash floods came through and took the bridge at Arrow Creek, the pine was still standing, a little bent, its top branch pointing at the hills like a finger. Lorna got across on the lorry and sat in the cab until the water dropped, and when she finally walked out to it, she found a child's kite snagged in its lowest bough, the string trailing down into the grit.

She left the kite where it was. So should you, if you ever go that way. The road keeps its own count.