Koala clinging to a eucalyptus branch

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A single black line drawing of a koala with rounded ears, a large dark nose and small eyes, hugging a slender branch that runs vertically through the image. The linework uses tapering strokes of varying thickness, with the body shown as a simple open curve and the branch drawn as one bold stroke with a few smaller leaf-like marks. The design is in black ink only, centred on an empty white background.

Fine line Branch Animal Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sprig arrived in the post in March, wrapped in brown paper that had been soaked and dried so many times it had gone soft as cloth. Nell Harrow unpicked the string at the kitchen table while the kettle ticked behind her. Inside was a single grey-green branch, no longer than her forearm, and a card in her brother's cramped capitals: HOLD ON TO THIS, IT'S THE ONLY THING I COULD FIND THAT SMELLS RIGHT.

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She had not seen Tom in eleven years, not since the row over the sheep sale. Their father's farm sat on a bald shoulder of Dartmoor where the wind came in off the tors and found every gap in the walls. Nothing grew there that Tom would recognise as a tree. Still, she held the branch to her face and breathed, and the oil of it went straight to the back of her throat, sharp as a cough sweet and as clean.

She pinned it above the range, where the heat rose. By February the leaves had curled and dropped, but the stem stayed green when she scratched it with her thumbnail. Each morning she fed the stove and looked at it before she looked at the weather.

On the first hard frost she found a second parcel on the step, no postmark, and inside it a small pencil drawing of a round grey creature clinging to a branch, eyes half shut, as if it had decided the whole winter could wait. She propped it against the clock and went out to see to the ewes, leaving the back door open a crack so the cold could come in and smell the leaves too.