Back view of a person's lower leg showing a black and grey botanical pine tree tattoo on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pine tree tattoo on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A tall pine or fir tree runs vertically down the back of the lower leg, with a tapered trunk and layered, branch-like tiers of foliage. The tree is rendered in black and grey with shaded areas that give it depth. The subject is photographed from behind against a plain wall with a patterned hanging, with the tattoo placed centrally in the frame.

Botanical Calf Pine tree Conifer Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow has been falling since Tuesday, and the road over the pass closed behind the carrier's van before you finished your first cup of tea at the Hollin Gate inn. Mrs Aske, who keeps the place with her nephew and a temper like a kettle, says the drifts will reach the sills by morning. She hands you a key on a brass fob shaped like a cone. Room four, at the top of the stairs, where the window looks straight down the valley at the single fir the drovers called the Taper.

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Nobody agrees on who planted it. The landlord's ledger says 1787, the vicar says a shepherd's wife dropped a seed in her apron, and the nephew says a surveyor wanted a sight line for the boundary wall and then forgot the wall. Everyone agrees on the shape: a trunk that narrows to a needle at the top, and branches that come in tiers, each a little shorter than the one below, so that in the blue hour the snow sits on every layer like icing on a cake nobody will eat. You watch it from the bed until the lamp in the yard goes out.

At supper Tobias brings barley broth and asks whether you are the man from the survey office. You say no. He looks disappointed, then relieved, and tells you the office sent someone last winter who measured the Taper with a tape and a great deal of swearing, then reported it three feet shorter than it stands. Nobody believed him. Mrs Aske pinned the report above the bar, and it is still there, curling at the corners, with a thumbprint of gravy in one margin.

In the morning the lane is sealed, but the sky has cleared to a hard blue. From the top step you can see the Taper standing black against the white hill, its trunk running down into the drift as if the tree were rooted in the valley floor and the floor were only deep. Tobias comes up with a shovel and stops beside you. "Three feet short," he says, and you find you have measured it too, by eye, and it is exactly right.