Black ink botanical tattoo on a lower leg showing a swirling tree with a meditating figure, a small hummingbird and the word Namaste in script.

Meditating figure in a swirling tree with Namaste

Botanical · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo shows a tree with swirling branches and leaves, a silhouetted figure seated in a meditation pose within the crown, and a small hummingbird flying at the upper left. The word Namaste sits in script beneath the figure, with curling roots below. The linework is solid black with no shading or colour, set against plain skin and a softly blurred background.

Botanical Calf Tree Swirl Leaves Root Figure Hummingbird Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, the pair of you, and mind the kettle, because this is the story my grandmother told me about the ash tree on the tip above Gellfach, and she never once told it without taking her shoes off first. There was a tree growing out of the spoil heap. Nobody planted it. It came up through the grey shale the year the number three shaft flooded, and every man in the village walked past it going down and coming up, and every man said it would be dead by Michaelmas.

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It did not die. Its roots went down through the shale and found the old workings, the galleries the men had cut, and they wound about the timber props like ivy up a chapel wall. Old Idris Pryce, who had lost two fingers to a runaway tub and a good deal of his temper to the same, swore he heard it creaking at night when the pit ground settled. Then one winter a boy named Emyr Lloyd, sixteen and too clever for his boots, went down to fetch his father's lamp and never came back up.

His mother did not weep at the pithead. She walked up the tip every evening and sat cross-legged at the foot of that tree, hands open on her knees, breathing the way the chapel minister had taught her, in and out, until the light went off the valley. The women of the row began to sit with her. Then the men. Nobody spoke. A small bird nobody in Gellfach had ever seen the like of hung over them all in the cold air, its wings going so fast they seemed to stand still.

Here is the part that makes my grandmother stop and look at the fire. In March the roots at the foot of the tree split the shale, and out of the crack came the lamp, still lit, and beside it a tin cup with Emyr's initials scratched on the handle. Nobody has ever explained that. The tree is still there. Put your hand on its bark if you go up, and you will feel it humming, slow as a sleeping man breathing.