Black botanical tattoo of a tall pine tree on the calf, with its roots spreading down over the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pine tree with roots on a lower leg

Botanical · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A tall, slender conifer rises up the back of the lower leg, with its trunk and branch tiers drawn in black ink. Its roots fan out over the ankle bone in fine, branching lines. The tattoo is black and grey, with soft shading on the foliage and a plain, pale background of wooden flooring and a room.

Botanical Calf Ankle Pine tree Conifer Tree Root Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reservoir had swallowed Tallow Bridge the winter before Ruth was born, but the pine on the ridge above it never seemed to notice. Every Sunday she climbed up with a flask and a folder of council letters, and every Sunday the water sat a little lower in the gap between the hills, showing the grey stubs of walls where the lane had run.

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Her father had carried the tree up as a seedling in a biscuit tin, the summer she was born, because the van had no room for it. He used to say a tree puts its roots down as far as it reaches up, and she had taken that for a rule about people too. By the time the valley was lost the pine was taller than the chapel steeple had been, and its roots ran down the slope in pale threads, some of them, the surveyors swore, into the drowned churchyard.

The water board wanted the tree felled before the new shore path was laid. They came on a Tuesday with a lorry, a chainsaw and a clipboard. Ruth stood between the trunk and the machine with the chapel secretary's last letter in her coat pocket, and when the foreman asked what she thought she was doing, she read him the line about her grandmother's stone, slowly, the way you read something you have memorised.

He stood there a long time, then tucked the clipboard under his arm and told his lads to pack up. That evening she watched from the bank as the level crept up the roots, until the tree stood with its feet in the lake and its tip still dark against the last of the light.