Small solid black pine tree tattoo sitting centred between the shoulder blades on a person's upper back.

Pine tree on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black silhouette of a pine or fir tree with a tapering, layered crown and a long bare trunk sits on the centre of the upper back. The edges are smooth and filled without visible shading, so the design reads as a single flat shape. The background is a neutral, softly lit skin tone with an off-white top and a dark bra strap, and the head and face are out of frame.

Botanical Back Pine tree Conifer Tree Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Penhallow had said the boarding house would be quiet in October, and she was right about that much. By the second week the only sounds were the gulls on the slate roof and the kettle on the landing, and you had learned to listen for the particular knock of the postman's bicycle against the gate at ten past eleven.

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The lone pine stood on the headland above Crane Cove, the one tree the wind had never bullied into crouching. You walked to it each afternoon with a flask and a notebook you never opened. Its trunk leaned seaward like a man bracing against a door, and its crown tapered into layers so dark they looked cut from tin. Mrs Penhallow's son had told you it was older than the harbour wall. He said that the year the storms took the lifeboat shed, the tree kept its needles and lost nothing else.

On the last Thursday you found a folded chart pinned inside the wardrobe door in room seven, the paper gone soft as cloth. Someone had marked the cove in pencil and drawn a single straight line up to the headland, ending in a small black cross beside the pine. Beneath it, in careful capitals, were the words STAY UNTIL IT STOPS RAINING.

You stayed. The rain did not stop. On Friday you climbed the path in the wet with the chart in your coat, and at the foot of the trunk, where the roots had lifted the turf, you dug with your hands until the cold came up through your nails and found a tin box, rusted shut. Inside lay a single brass key with no lock to match it, and a slip of paper that read, in the same careful hand, ON THE NEXT CLEAR DAY, COME DOWN TO THE SHED.