Black serif lettering reading And the tree was happy runs along the top of a shoulder in a warmly lit close-up photo.

Quote tattoo along the shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of a shoulder and upper chest with a short line of text tattooed along the top of the shoulder. The lettering is a black serif typeface with fine, even strokes and generous spacing between words. The skin is warm toned under soft indoor lighting, with a dark top at the bottom of the frame and a pale wall behind.

Lettering Shoulder Quote Text Tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, all of you, and mind the goat. Now, the fig tree at the top of the Hollow Road. Your grandmothers' grandmothers knew it as old Sefa, though the tree never said whose name it liked best. It stood where the track bent around the spring, and every hot afternoon the carters stopped under it, and the dust-men, and the widow who sold lamp oil, and the boy who came up from the lowlands to find work and found none.

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Each of them took something. A carter took a bough to mend a wheel. The widow took figs for her grandchildren. The boy took nothing but shade. He sat with his back against the bark until the sun went down, because he had no one at home to tell him where he belonged.

Years passed, as years do. The wheels grew heavier and the figs fewer. One autumn the carters came up the road and found the trunk split by lightning. They said what a pity, and drove on. But the boy came back with a saw of his own making and a sapling wrapped in wet sacking. He planted it beside the wreck and sat in the thin strip of shade it gave, which was no shade at all yet, and he waited.

And the sapling grew, slow as a thought, until one summer it leaned over the old stump and cast a full square of cool across his knees. The boy laughed out loud, the way a man laughs when he has forgotten he was ever tired. The old tree, split and silvered, could not laugh, but it had never needed to. And the tree was happy.