Black and white photo of a small black bare tree tattoo in fine line style on the back of a person's neck, with hair tied up above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small bare tree tattoo on the nape

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black bare tree with thin, spreading branches sits on the skin at the back of the neck, just below the hairline. The linework is fine and the tree is drawn as a simple silhouette with no shading. The photograph is monochrome, with soft light on the skin and a grey knitted garment across the shoulder.

Fine line Botanical Neck Tree Bare tree Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thorn on the headland had been dead since the winter my father stopped climbing the tower, but nobody had the heart to fell it. It stood alone above the rocks at Scarrow Point, a black hand held up against the weather, its branches combed flat by forty years of westerlies. Every evening I carried the paraffin up the path and every evening I counted its limbs, eleven on the left, nine on the right, because counting was the only thing that kept my mind off the lamp.

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Mrs Pryce at the cottages said the tree was a warning that the sea would take the point. My mother said it was only a bit of blackthorn that had lost an argument with the wind. In March a surveyor came up with a clipboard and a yellow hat and wanted the light moved inland, away from the crumbling edge. He stood under the branches a long while, tapping his pencil against his teeth, then wrote something down and walked back to his van without looking at the tower at all.

The storm came in on the equinox. The lamp failed at midnight and I climbed the iron stairs with a torch clamped in my teeth, my hands numb on the rail. When I reached the gallery a flash of lightning lit the headland white for a second, and the tree stood there, every branch sharp as a crack in glass. I understood then that its shape was no sign of anything, only a record of how hard it had leaned into the wind and kept its footing.

By May it had put out one bud at the tip of its highest limb, a green so pale it looked like breath on a cold window. I did not tell my mother. I went up in the evening, lit the lamp, and counted the branches again, and this time I got eleven on both sides.