Realism-style tattoo of a tall black pine tree with roots spreading down onto the foot, set against an orange and yellow sunset gradient on the lower leg.

Pine tree and roots over a sunset on the leg

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A tall black pine tree rises up the lower leg, with its trunk shaded in grey and its branches drawn as dense dark silhouettes. Its roots spread down over the ankle and onto the top of the foot. Behind the tree, soft bands of yellow, orange and red shade into a sunset sky, and the photograph shows the tattoo on a bare leg against a pale floor.

Realism Calf Ankle Pine tree Tree Root Sunset Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody had come back to Culverhill for the buffet, Mr Achterberg said, and he was right, because the buffet was warm sausage rolls and a trifle that had slumped in its bowl. We came for the hill behind the old grammar school, where the Scots pine stood alone above the playing fields. It was the one thing in the county the council had never managed to fell, and every year someone from our form had a story about climbing it.

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Miss Dunmore planted it the spring we started at the school. She made each year seven press a needle into a jam jar on her windowsill and write our names on the lid, and by the time we left the jars had turned the room smoky with resin. She used to walk us up after lessons to watch the sun go down behind the crown, the sky over the Fens going the colour of marmalade while the branches stood black against it, and she would say the roots were doing more work than anyone could see.

Dennis Crook had the photograph on his phone. The tree had come down in March after the big wind, and the council had sawn it into lengths, but the stump was still there on the bank with its roots gripping the clay like a hand that refused to let go. We walked up at dusk, the four of us, and found the roots had pushed through the turf in long crooked fingers, spread flat as though something had pressed its palm down and kept it there.

We each picked up a fallen needle, a single one, and nobody said much about it. Dennis put his in his shirt pocket. When I got home I found the jam jar Miss Dunmore had given me, still on the shelf, and I put the needle in it with the others and screwed the lid on tight.