Small black pine tree tattoo on the neck just behind the ear, with a silver hoop earring in the lobe.

Small pine tree behind the ear

Botanical · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small black pine tree sits on the skin behind the ear, with a tapering trunk and layered branches drawn as a dark silhouette. The ink is solid black with fine tiered edges, and the tree is set against a soft, lightly lit neck and hair. The composition is close and tightly cropped, with the tattoo as the clear focal point.

Botanical Neck Pine tree Tree Conifer Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The men from the estate came up Hollin Lane on the Tuesday with their chalk and measuring rods, and by dinner they had marked forty-one pines between the mill and the churchyard wall. My father had been dead a fortnight. Nobody thought to ask whether his tree would be on the list, because nobody but me remembered it was his.

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It stood at the bend above Sawyer's Gate, a lone Scots pine grown crooked from wind, never any use for planks. Dad called it the post. When I was small he lifted me to touch its lowest branch and told me the village ended wherever that tree could see. I thought it was a story until I was twelve and walked the boundary with him and found the old stone sunk in the moss exactly where its roots went down.

The foreman, a tidy young man called Pruett, had a sheet full of numbers and no patience for stories. He wanted the post marked too. I told him chalk would only run in the rain and he could come back in spring. He looked at the tree, then at me, and wrote something down that I never read.

In March the rowan came down in a gale and the bank slumped, and the estate crew found the stone right where Dad said it would be, with the pine standing over it like a sentry with one arm out. They left it alone. I go up on Sundays now with a flask and sit on the stone, counting the tiers of its branches the way he taught me, and every one of them still points the same way home.