Solid black silhouette of the state of Ohio with tree roots spreading beneath it, drawn as a design on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ohio silhouette with roots

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of the state of Ohio sits above a network of branching roots that spread outwards and downwards. The shape is filled with flat black ink with no shading, and the roots taper to fine points at their ends. The image is set on a plain white background with the design centred and filling most of the frame.

State outline Root Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The buckeye came down in March, the week after the ice storm, and by Saturday noon half of Harlan Street had gathered at the Kessler fence to look at its roots. They lifted out of the mud like the fingers of a hand dragged from a river, pale and split, some as thick as a man's wrist and the finest no thicker than sewing thread. Nobody on the street had known the tree went so far down. Nobody had thought about what the ground under their own houses was holding in place.

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Dale Kessler stood on the porch with his phone in his hand and a flight to Phoenix booked for Tuesday. His mother had planted the buckeye the summer they moved in, when he was four and she was still sure the town would be good to them. She had kept a county road map pinned in the kitchen for forty years, the state folded so often the lines had gone soft, and every spring she drew a small star on the spot where the tree's shadow fell first. He had never asked her why. Now the roots were out in the open and the stars were gone.

Ruth Pell from number nine came across the lawn in her slippers and crouched beside the largest root. She followed it with her thumb to where it forked, then forked again, each branch narrowing until it was only a hair in the clay. "Every one of them ends in a point," she said. "It never stopped looking for more ground." Dale said nothing. He fetched a spade from the shed.

He dug for an hour, working out the finest root he could find until it came away whole, nearly four feet of pale wood tapering to a thread. He wrapped it in a wet towel from the bathroom and laid it on the passenger seat, and on Tuesday the towel was still damp when he parked at the airport.