Large botanical tattoo of a gnarled tree with exposed roots and red leaves across a bare back, shaded in brown and grey with green bamboo behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gnarled tree with red leaves across a back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large tree with a twisted trunk, spreading branches and tangled roots covers most of the back. The trunk and roots are shaded in grey and brown with fine, wiry linework, while the leaves are filled in with muted red. The tree is centred on the spine and set against a plain, outdoor background of bamboo.

Botanical Back Tree Root Branches Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Aldous Penhale had been stationmaster at Carrow Halt for twenty-two years, and in all that time the oak had never once been in the way of a timetable. It stood at the end of the single platform, older than the rails, its trunk twisted like a wrung cloth where some long-dead farmer had tried to fence it. Its roots had worked up through the flags until the bench tilted and the milk churns had to be rolled uphill.

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When the county's letter came in September, Aldous read it twice in the ticket office with the kettle going cold. He folded it into his waistcoat and went out to the platform, where Ruth Castle from the post office was already waiting under the branches with her umbrella furled.

"They'll have it down by Friday," she said. "Shame. It's the only thing here that turns red before anybody notices."

The leaves had started early that year, dark wine at the tips of the upper boughs and creeping down the wiry twigs like spilt ink. Aldous suspected the tree knew it was being measured for the axe and had decided to show off. He picked a fallen leaf off the gravel, pressed it flat with his thumb, and laid it in the faded green timetable booklet at the page for the last service of the day.

On Friday the saws came at seven. Aldous watched from the signal box until the last branch thudded onto the track, then walked down to the stump, still warm with sap. The roots were left in the ground, a snarl of grey wire running under the platform in every direction. Two days later a girl got off the 4.15 with a brown paper parcel and asked him, politely, where the tree had gone. He opened the booklet to the page and let her see.