Black and grey tree tattoo with red autumn leaves, its roots running down the side of the ribs and hip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gnarled tree with roots along the side

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo of a gnarled, bare tree with twisting branches and exposed roots spreads across the side of the torso and down towards the hip. The trunk and roots are shaded in grey with dark outlines and fine texture, while a few small red leaves drift from the upper branches. The tree fills most of the frame, with a hand and part of a white top visible at the right edge.

Botanical Ribs Tree Root Branches Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The council had said the sycamore would come down before spring, so Mrs Okafor's grandson and I started counting its leaves instead, which seemed fairer. Forty-one, the first week. The tree stood in the car park of Hollins House with its roots lifted through the tarmac like knuckles, and every morning someone kicked a sign into the bins that said KEEP OFF.

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Nobody on the eleventh floor believed it would last. My flat looked straight down on it, and in February I watched it do what trees do when they have given up, branches black and twisted, reaching at nothing above the bins. I used to think it looked angry. Later I thought it looked like it was listening.

In April a single leaf came, red as a traffic cone, then another, then a handful, and the children from block C started a rota to check them. Mrs Okafor said the roots had found the old culvert that ran under the estate before the flats went up, and that trees remember water the way people remember streets. I told her that was nonsense. She gave me a look and sent me down with a jam jar.

On the last morning before the demolition men arrived, I went down early and stood under it. The red leaves were loose in the wind, lifting off the upper branches and drifting across the car park towards the fence. I picked up one that had landed on my shoe and put it in the jar. It was still warm from the sun. It sits on my windowsill now, and from up here the tree is only a grey shape in the car park, with the roots still holding on.