Black and grey realistic pine tree tattoo with trailing roots running down the inner forearm.

Pine tree on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tall conifer tree is tattooed down the inner forearm, with dense needle clusters shaded in black and grey and the lower trunk trailing into long, thin root lines. The shading builds depth in the upper branches, while the roots are drawn with fine, sparse strokes. The photograph is taken in dim light, with a grey sleeve and a hand wearing a silver ring visible at the edges.

Botanical Realism Forearm Pine tree Conifer Tree Root Forest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on the wall, and mind the coal dust, it gets into everything up here. You want to know about the tree. Everybody wants to know about the tree. Owen Pryce planted it the spring after the water came up through the number four level, when the men stood at the top of the shaft with their caps in their hands and nobody would say the names out loud.

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He took the seedling from the slope above the spoil heap, where nothing green had any right to grow on that grey shale. Folk said it would be dead by June. Owen carried it down each morning in a tin bucket, watered it from the chapel tap because the well was tainted, and talked to it the way he used to talk to the pit ponies, low and steady, telling it which way was up.

The thing about roots, he told me once, is that they go where the work is hardest. By the second winter they had found the old drift under the hill, the one the surveyors had sealed with concrete and forgotten. Pale threads of them ran down through the cracks in the rock like the lines a man drops into deep water, feeling for the bottom. When the engineers came back in ninety-one to check the subsidence, they found the ground holding firm over the old workings and could not say why.

Owen never got his name on a plaque. He got a tree that stands taller than the chapel now, and a village that sleeps easier when the wind is in the north. Put your hand on the bark before you go. It is cold, that bark, always. But the roots are warm, so my mother used to say, and that is where the work gets done.