Back view of a person sitting on grass, with a small solid black pine tree tattoo in a silhouette style on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pine tree tattoo on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A person sits on grass seen from behind, with the head cropped out of frame. A small, solid black conifer or pine tree sits along the centre of the upper back, with tiered branches tapering to a point. The tree is filled in black ink with no visible shading or colour, and it stands out against the pale skin in the middle of a casual outdoor composition.

Blackwork Back Pine tree Conifer Tree Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The surveyor's last instruction was to count the pines, not the sheep, because the sheep would lie to me and the trees would not. We had been three days climbing Harrow Gap with the theodolite wrapped in a blanket like a sleeping child, and on the fourth morning the cloud came down so low that the only thing I could see of the world was the next dark shape on the path.

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Each shape was a conifer, tiered and narrow, black against grey rock. Aske walked ahead, stopping every hundred paces to scratch a stroke in his ledger. He told me the old pines had been planted by a monk who believed a tree on a ridge could hold a road in place. I thought he was making it up until we reached the last one, standing alone above the scree, its branches stacked like the layers of a wedding cake left out in the rain.

Aske stopped there and would not go further. He said the road ended at that tree and always had, that the rock had taken everything else in the winter of the big slide. He pressed his palm flat against the bark and told me to take a bearing from it, north-east, toward the village we could not see. I took the bearing. When I looked up the cloud had lifted a hand's width, and beyond the tree a line of white peaks stood sharp against a sky I had not believed was there.

I wrote the number in my book and underlined it twice. Aske was already walking back down, his ledger tucked under one arm. I kept the reading, though it was wrong by a degree, and I have never corrected it, because the tree was the one true thing on that ridge and a line on a map should bow to it.