Black and grey ink drawing of a skull whose jaw and crown grow into twisted branches, with a forest scene in a circle, a deer, birds and orange falling leaves, shown as a botanical tattoo design with

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull formed from a tree and forest

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows a human skull made from twisted tree trunks and branches, with a circular vignette in the crown that frames a misty forest, a leaping deer and bare trunks. A perched bird sits at the left edge, a second bird stands on a root mound at the lower right, and small orange leaves drift around the skull. The linework is fine and dense, with shading built from cross-hatching and stippling in black and grey, and the orange leaves are the only colour accents.

Botanical Skull Tree Forest Deer Bird Leaves Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last of the larches came down on a Tuesday, and by the Thursday old Anselm had stopped complaining about his knees and started complaining about the light. Nell carried his tea out to the clearing each morning and found him on the stump with his eyes shut, listening to the trees talk among themselves, which he swore they had done since before the Hallam sawmill was built.

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He had been the valley's forester for fifty-one years, and the village said the wood had taken him back the way it took everything, slowly, through the roots. Nobody thought it strange when the mound at the edge of the clearing began to rise in the shape of a skull, or when birches pushed up through its eye sockets and the grey stag came down to drink from the hollow where its teeth should have been. Nell's mother called it grief. Nell called it Tuesday, because that was the day it had started.

In the spring the sawmen came up the valley with their chains and their ledgers. Their foreman wanted the birches in the crown for pit props, and he jabbed his pencil at the pale trunk growing from the old man's brow as if it were already priced. Nell stood in front of it with the axe on her shoulder. The stag walked out of the mist between the trunks, slow as a clock, and stopped with its head level with hers. The foreman, who had not believed in much since the war, took off his cap and did not put it back on.

They went down the valley without a single birch. Nell still carries the tea out every morning. Some mornings there is an orange leaf on the saucer, and a small brown bird waiting on the root, as if it has been told to keep count.