Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Pine cone on upper back
Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo
A small pine cone is tattooed in the centre of the upper back, drawn with dark outlines and scale shapes. The linework is fine and the scales are partly shaded with grey, giving the cone some depth. The ink is black on pale skin, and the beige lace bra strap sits at the bottom edge of the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The cones came down all at once that October, after the gale took the top off the old Scots pine by the potting shed. Grandad sent me out in wellingtons with a feed sack before the squirrels got a head start, and I went along the lawn counting them like coins.
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He had a rule about them. Never pick a green one, because it would only sulk on the windowsill and never open. Take the brown ones, the ones that had already given their seeds to the wind, and set them out on the sill of the back kitchen where the afternoon sun reached in. "They're honest," he said. "Scales open when it's dry, shut tight when rain's coming on. Better than the wireless."
By the second week the sill looked like a row of tiny brown shuttered houses. He would tap the glass with his pipe stem and say the big one by the kettle was thinking about rain, and by teatime it would be. He never once got it wrong, though I suspected he was reading the sky as well as the cones, and the cones were simply easier to trust.
The week he went into hospital, I checked the sill every morning. The cones had all closed up tight against the damp that hung over the garden, and I left them that way. When he came home in January, the first thing he did was walk to the window and hold his palm flat beside the glass, waiting for the one that would finally open for him.
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