Black and grey dotwork oak leaf tattoo with the year 1908 written above it, sitting on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Oak leaf with date on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large oak leaf with deeply lobed edges runs diagonally across the arm, with the number 1908 in plain script above its stem. The leaf is outlined in fine black line and filled with stippled dots and light shading that give the veins and lobes depth. The image is a close, slightly angled shot on a plain indoor background with a person's sleeve visible at the right edge.

Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Leaf Vein

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Father had the surveyor's chain looped over one shoulder when he came up from the lower meadow, and he did not stop at the gate to say good morning, which was how I knew the wood was to be sold. Thirty acres of oak, he said, and the timber man from Maidstone had already walked it with a ledger under his arm. I asked what would become of the young trees along the bank. He said they would come down with the rest, and then he went inside and did not come out for supper.

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I went down to the bank that evening with my pocket knife and cut a leaf from the sapling nearest the gate, the one Grandfather planted the spring the railway came through. Its lobes were soft and deep as the cut of a rowing boat's prow. I pressed it inside the almanac on the kitchen dresser, the one with 1908 printed across the top, and wrote the year beside it in pencil so I would know which spring it was.

The timber men came three weeks later with their saws and their two grey horses. I stood at the fence with the almanac held against my chest while they worked through the morning. When the last cart rattled off down the lane, I walked to the bank and found the sapling still standing. The foreman had forgotten to mark it, and the man who had been sent to fell it had taken a fever and gone home to Kent.

I still have the almanac. The leaf has gone the colour of weak tea, but the pencilled year is clear, and the little oak is taller than the gate now, holding its lobed leaves up against the sky as if nothing had ever been asked of it.