Black silhouette flash design of a skeleton standing among twisting branches, vines and leaves on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeleton entwined with branches

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a skeleton stands in profile, with its arms and torso merged into a network of twisting branches and vines. The linework is bold and uses no shading, with small leaf and bud shapes scattered along the stems. The design is set on a plain white background, with roots and grass spreading across the base.

Botanical Skeleton Branches Vine Leaves Root Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, the lot of you, and stop passing that flask about before the good bit. You want to know what became of Walter Pell after the reunion at Hollin Grammar? I'll tell it, but you'll not interrupt me the way you did in the sixth form.

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He came back in the autumn of ninety-nine, thirty years on from the leavers' dance, in a suit that still had the shop creases in it and a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums he didn't know what to do with. Nobody recognised him at first. Then Mrs Oddie said his name the way she used to when he'd been caught up the chestnut by the bike sheds, and the whole hall went quiet. He asked for a glass of water and drank it standing at the window, looking out at the field where the old oak had been before they felled it for the new science block.

Here's the thing none of you knew. Walter used to sit under that oak every break, reading, and when the council took it down he went out at night with a spade and dug up one root, a thick grey thing as long as his arm, and carried it home in a carrier bag. He planted it in his mother's garden in Crowle. It didn't grow the way a tree grows, mind. It grew the way a story does, slow and then all at once, and by the time his mother died it had a grip on the fence and was pushing up through the coal shed roof.

So he left the reunion early with his chrysanthemums, and I'm told he was found in the spring standing in that garden, wound round a branch, with leaves coming out between his ribs. The vicar said it was the most peaceful thing he'd ever seen. I'm not sure the vicar was looking hard enough. Now, who's for another round? I'll tell you the rest when somebody's bought me one.