Solid black blackwork tattoo on a lower leg, showing a peace sign enclosing a human silhouette with outstretched arms whose head and limbs become bare tree branches and roots.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peace sign with tree-figure silhouette on a leg

Blackwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a figure in a Vitruvian-style pose sits inside a circle, with its arms extended to form the peace sign's diagonal lines. Its head and arms dissolve into bare branches and its legs into roots, creating a tree-like form. The ink is bold and uniform with clean edges, shown in close crop against plain skin.

Blackwork Calf Peace sign Tree Branches Root Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The water tank at Sallow Cross had been painted with a circle and three lines the year the convoys stopped coming through, and nobody afterwards agreed who had done it. Ines Maroud, who ran the fuel depot with a dog and a ledger, claimed it was her brother, who had been dead eleven years by then. She kept the paint tins under the counter anyway, and when the dust storms took the last of the tamarisk she decided the crossroads needed something that could stand up to wind.

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She sent for a sapling from the coast, a fig with its roots wrapped in wet sacking, and it rode out on the back of a salt lorry with a driver who wouldn't stop talking. Planting it took a whole morning. The ground was crusted and she broke it with a borrowed pick, and the driver, Tomas, leaned on the tank and watched her swear at the earth. "It won't live," he said. "Probably not," she said, and kept digging until the hole was deep enough to hold the sacking whole.

Rain came in the spring, not much, enough to make the fig put out a leaf the colour of a bruise. Then a second. By the next summer its branches had reached over the tank's painted edge, and the three roads leading out of Sallow Cross seemed to bend towards it without anybody asking them to. Travellers stopped to photograph it, then stopped to stay the night, and the depot's ledger began to fill with names rather than litres.

On the last evening of the drought, Ines walked out to the fig with a lantern and found the roots had pushed up through the cracked concrete base of the circle, exactly where the lines met. She knelt and pressed her palm to the bark. It was warm, like a shoulder. Somewhere behind her a lorry horn sounded twice, the old signal for safe passage, and she didn't turn round, because she already knew who was coming.