Black and grey botanical tattoo of oak leaves, acorns and pine sprigs across a man's upper chest and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Oak leaves and acorns on chest and shoulder

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded tattoo of oak leaves, two acorns and pine sprigs with small cones spreads over the upper chest and reaches onto the shoulder. The leaves use bold outlines with soft grey shading and fine hatching, giving them depth and a lobed, textured look. The image is in black ink only, with the design centred on the chest and the skin around it left plain.

Botanical Realism Chest Shoulder Acorn Pine cone Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had got under the awning by ten, so I dragged the trestle in against the fishmonger's wall and let the pine sprigs drip onto the slabs. Nobody buys acorns in March. They come in October, when the kids are bored and the old oak by the canal is dropping everything at once. Still, Mr Okafor from the allotments came along with his collar up and asked for two good ones, the fat, dull-brown kind with the cap still tight, and I knew he meant to plant them rather than look at them.

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He held the first one up to the light the way my mother used to, as if the thing might tell him its age. 'Eighty years for the trunk,' he said, 'and it starts in something this size.' I told him my mother said the same about the cones, that they only open when the air is dry, so you can read the weather off a pine that has forgotten how to be wet. He laughed, then stopped, because the rain had found the back of his neck and he was thinking about his knees.

He paid in coins, then fished a folded sheet out of his coat with a leaf pressed flat inside, lobed and brown at the edges. The oak by the canal, he said, was his grandfather's, planted the year the bridge went up. I had sold him acorns for six years and never once asked him anything. I asked now. He said that was the trouble with markets: everyone brings something to sell, and nobody brings what they came for.

After he'd gone I packed the tin, kept back a pine sprig for my window, and found I had counted the acorns twice. The rain kept on at the awning. Somewhere up the canal the old tree was letting go of another handful, and I was too far away to hear it.