Sketchy black and grey tattoo of a gnarled tree trunk with a single red heart hanging by a thread, placed on the side of the ribs.

Hanging red heart on a cracked tree trunk

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a gnarled tree trunk with roots at the base, cracked bark lines and a small eye-like shape in the upper section. A red heart hangs from a thread at the right, the only area of colour against the black and grey shading. The loose, sketchy linework is combined with soft grey shading, and the design wraps diagonally across the side of the torso.

Ribs Tree Root Heart Thread Crack Eye Bark

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The showman's wagons have been parked under the same oak for three nights, and by the third you have learned that the tree is the only thing on the common that stays still when the generator coughs. Its bark splits in long grey seams, and in one of them, about the height of your shoulder, something watches from the wood. Mr Ashdown calls it a knot. You have decided it is not a knot.

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Each evening, once the last light is off the big wheel, the ride boys climb the trunk to hang a small red heart from a thread, one for every debt they owe the fair. You take it for a joke until your cousin Lottie, who sold candyfloss and never once lied to you, leaves hers on the lowest root and asks you to fetch it back before dawn. The heart is cold and heavier than it should be. The thread runs up from it into the dark like a line you could follow.

So you follow it. The roots grip the earth like knuckles, and the bark gives under your palms as though the tree is breathing. Near the top the seams open into a face that is only an eye, wet and patient, and the thread goes straight into its lid. You hold the heart up to it and say Lottie's name, the way your nan taught you to say a thing you mean to keep. The eye closes. The thread goes slack in your hand.

At first light the fair is gone to the next town, and the oak stands alone on the common with one fresh heart swinging over the grass. You keep the thread wound round your wrist, and it is only on the road that you notice it has never stopped pulling a little, the way a kite does when the wind has not yet decided where to go.