Black and grey realism tattoo of a bearded green man face framed by oak leaves on an upper arm.

Green man with oak leaves on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of a bearded green man face framed by oak leaves and acorns, with braided foliage trailing down the arm. Detailed shading and fine linework build up the face, leaves and hair in greys and black. The photo is a side view of the upper arm and shoulder, with the wearer's face cropped out of frame and a tie-dye top visible behind.

Botanical Realism Upper arm Face Acorn Beard Foliage Braid

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carter from Sallow Bottom swore he would have the oak down before Michaelmas, whatever the old women said about the face in its bark. He brought his two sons and a crosscut saw with a blade as long as a man's arm, and they set to on the first hard frost, when the sap was low and the rooks had gone quiet in the elms.

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The wood did not take kindly to it. The saw bound in the cut and would not come free, and when they drove an iron wedge in to open it, the sound that came out of the trunk was like a long breath drawn in through clenched teeth. By noon the eldest boy had a split across his palm that would not close, and the younger one swore he had seen the bark move under his hand like the skin on a horse's flank. Still the carter would not stop. Money was owed at the mill.

At dusk, with the wedge driven deep and one last pull to make, the carter looked up and saw the face. It had come out of the bark where the split ran, grey and broad as a cartwheel, with oak leaves for brows and a beard that hung down the trunk in braided roots, each braid tied off with a hazel nut. Its eyes were closed. When it opened them they were the colour of rain on slate.

"Take the wood," it said, in a voice like a gate on a rusted hinge, "and you take every hedge it feeds from here to the river. Leave me my roots and I will leave you yours."

The carter let go of the saw. He walked home without a word and slept in his boots. In spring the hedges along the lane came up thicker than anyone remembered, and the carter's own beard, which had gone grey over the autumn, grew out in a tangle of oak leaves that his wife combed free with her fingers every Sunday until the day he died.