Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a house framed by branching trees and roots, sitting on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

House with branches and roots on a calf

Blackwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A sketchy black linework house with a chimney and a door sits at the centre, with bare branches arching over the roof and spreading to the sides. Roots and a ground line run beneath the building, and fine hatching shades the roof and trees. The design is in black ink only and fills an oval area of the calf against a pale wall.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The builders wanted the house moved, because the new road was coming through the orchard and the council had already paid for the land. Mrs Hobday said no. She had her bag packed for the hospital in Lewes, she told them, but the house was not going anywhere, and if they wanted it gone they could take a saw to the roof themselves.

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The men came with jacks and rollers and a flatbed lorry. They got the cellar stones loose by the Tuesday, and by the Thursday the chimney had started to lean towards the lane as if it wanted to see who was coming. Nobody could find where the house stopped and the ground began. Her grandfather had planted a sapling by the back step the year they married, and it had grown up through the kitchen boards and out of the bedroom window, and now its branches reached over the slates like a hand held over a cup.

The surveyor drove a stake at the boundary and struck roots under it, pale as tallow, running out beneath the hedge and down. He dug one up with a spade. It was still damp and smelled of bread. The men loaded their jacks onto the lorry and drove back to the depot without saying much. The road bends round the orchard now in a long, awkward curve that the council later called a mistake.

Mrs Hobday kept the front door on the latch all winter. In spring the leaves came out on the top branches first, as they always had, and when the postman asked her why she did not just let the house go, she said nobody had ever made her choose between the house and the tree, and she was not going to start at her age.

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