Black and grey pencil flash design of a money tree with banknotes falling from its branches, two devil figures and the words Money the root of all evil.

Money tree sketch with devil figures

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a bare tree with spreading branches, its trunk and roots rising from a mound. Banknotes drift through the branches and across the roots, and two horned devil figures reach up from below. The word MONEY is set in bold block capitals across the top, with a flowing script line beneath it and blackletter-style lettering across the bottom. It is rendered in pencil with soft shading and no colour.

Lettering Money Tree Banknote Devil Root Lettering Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Cook had been feeding the crew of the Marion Gale for nineteen years when the purser first brought him the tree. It came aboard at Gravesend in a crate of rope and pitch, a small blackened thing with roots like wet wire, and the purser said it would pay for the voyage if it were watered with the wages owed to men who had drowned. Cook did not ask what that meant. He had a stove to light.

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The tree grew in the corner of the galley where the lamp oil was kept. By the third week its branches had reached the beams, and by the fifth the leaves were stiff green paper with faces printed on them. The men came down for their burgoo and stood looking up. The bosun pulled one leaf free and found it was a ten-pound note, folded neat as a letter, and nobody spoke for a while.

Those who took from the tree were never short again, and the sea seemed to keep its distance from them. But each night two small devils climbed out from the roots and sat on the bread bin, counting, and each morning there was one less man at the rail.

Cook took the last of the notes out to the stern on the final night and burned them in the lamp. The flames went up green, then black, and the tree shook its branches like a dog coming out of water. He sat with the pot on his knees until dawn. When the watch came down they found the galley cold, the stove out, no tree at all, only a single banknote hooked to the nail where his apron hung, scorched at one corner and still good for its face value.