Black ink line drawing of a heart made of leaf veins, with the word DAD formed from leaves, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Heart of leaves spelling DAD

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a heart outline filled with leaf-like shapes and vein patterns. The word DAD is formed within the design, with the letters built from the leaf outlines and fine internal veins. The drawing is shown in monochrome on a plain white background, with no body part visible.

Botanical Lettering Heart Leaves Vein Dad Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had the grafting knife out before the frost had lifted off the wall, and he did not look up when I came through the gate. "Your father used to say a cut wants to be made once and left alone," he said. "You have been hovering all morning."

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The walled garden at Holm Abbey held forty old pear trees, and most of them had been grafted by one man, a lay gardener called Tobias Hale who came up the hill every spring with a canvas roll of scions tied in damp sacking. He never wrote anything down. He pressed the cambium of a young shoot against the stock until the two green rings met, bound the join with raffia, and scratched the variety onto a slip of lead. Anselm kept the slips in a biscuit tin. Some had gone grey and soft, and he read them aloud to me like psalms.

In the last week of March I found a sycamore leaf pressed inside the lid of that tin, its veins traced over in ink, and beneath it a note in Tobias's square hand: For the boy, when the grafts take. Anselm would not say whether the boy was me or someone who had come before. He only tapped the leaf with one finger and said the veins were the part that carried everything, and the rest was just shape.

When the grafts took that summer, I bound the last of them myself, and the pear wood healed clean along the join. I still think about that leaf. Some things are passed down in the veins rather than the name, and a man does not need to be standing in the orchard to keep them moving.