Close photo of a small fine-line black tree tattoo on the upper chest near the shoulder, with a grey tank top and fine necklace visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small bare tree on the upper shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A small tree with bare branches and a rounded crown is drawn in thin black linework, with no shading or fill. The tattoo sits on the upper chest near the shoulder edge, and the crop shows only the neck, shoulder and collarbone area. The soft, neutral background and grey tank top keep the focus on the single black tree.

Fine line Botanical Shoulder Tree Branches Bare tree Collarbone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobias had counted the branches of the hawthorn so many times that he could recite them, the way his mother had recited the psalms. Eleven on the seaward side, nine on the lee, and a crown the wind kept lopping that always grew back rounder. He was sixty-one and had kept the Scarra Point light for nineteen years, and in all that time the tree had never once put on a leaf in his sight.

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It stood alone behind the fog hut, rooted in a crack of basalt where nothing else would take. Mrs Pryce at the shop in Balnakeel said it was a rowan, and her husband said it was a hawthorn, and the keeper's log said only "tree, bare, unchanged." Tobias had written that line himself the morning after the storm of '03, when the boat from Oban went onto the skerries and he walked out at dawn to find the tree still standing with its black limbs flung out like a man arguing.

He wrote to his daughter in Leeds that autumn to say the light would be automated by spring. She wrote back asking whether he would take the tree with him. He read her letter on the gallery rail with the wind pulling at the paper, and laughed for the first time in weeks.

In March the relief boat came round the point. Tobias packed his sea chest, his pipe and the brass lamp key, and walked out to the hut one last time. The branches were still bare, but at the very tip of the crown there was a bud, small and red as a cut thumb. He stood there until the engine cut back. Then he left the key on the sill for the next man, and the tree, which had never needed him, stayed where it was.