Small black fine line tattoo of a pine tree inside a thin circle on the inner upper arm, with a red and white striped sleeve and brick wall behind.

Pine tree in a circle on an inner arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo shows a pine tree with layered, tapering branches and a straight trunk, enclosed by a thin unshaded circle. The linework is fine and even, with solid black ink and no grey shading. The tattoo sits on the inner upper arm, with a red and white striped sleeve at the left and a brick wall in the background.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Pine tree Tree Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Keep your hands in your pockets and your eyes on the stall, the old man said, because the rain never waits for the end of a tale. He had set his upturned crate between a fishmonger's ice and a stall selling secondhand kettles, and the crowd under the tarpaulins leaned in to hear him over the drumming. Up the hill, he told them, there was a single pine that grew from the rim of a round quarry cutting, so neatly circled by the old stone that the quarrymen named it after their foreman, who had been dead forty years.

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Every spring the pine dropped its needles into the rainwater that filled the cutting, and every spring a girl called Ilse Marrow climbed up with a bucket to bale the pool before it rotted. She was twelve. Her father said the tree would fall in the next gale, so she should not bother. She bothered anyway, because the pine was the only thing in the valley that stood straight when everything else leaned, and she wanted to see whether it could be made to lean with her.

On the third autumn the gale came. The old man lowered his voice so the stallholders had to lean closer over their boxes. The tree did not fall. It bent the way a bow bends, its branches tapering to points against the sky, until the wind dropped and the pine sprang back, flinging water over her like a dog shaking itself. Her father found her soaked and laughing at the bottom of the cutting, and he never again told her to stop going.

That is the whole of it, the storyteller said, pulling his coat tighter. The tree is still there, though they have fenced it now, and the water still comes. Mind your step on the way out.