Close photo of a hand held up in a forest, with a small black pine tree tattoo on the palm below the thumb.

Small pine tree tattoo on the palm

Botanical · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small solid black pine tree silhouette sits on the palm of a hand held up against a blurred conifer forest. The tree has a narrow tapering outline with short horizontal tiers of branches and a simple trunk, rendered in dark ink with little shading. The image is black and grey, with the greens and browns of the forest in the background.

Botanical Hand Pine tree Tree Forest Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last shift at Hollin Pit ended with the cage coming up empty, which my father said was the only honest thing the Coal Board ever did. Nobody cheered. Mam had the kettle on in the front room and the good tea out, the one with the gold rim that only came down for funerals and christenings, and we sat among the boxes waiting for the men to walk up the bank in their boots.

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My father had a rule about pines. Up the valley, past the spoil heaps, there was a stand of Scots pine nobody had ever cut, because the wind off the moor took the tops and the trunks grew crooked and stubborn. He said a pine would grow where nothing else would, and that was why it was worth carrying. The week I turned fourteen he gave me a stub of carpenter's pencil and told me to draw one on the back of my hand each morning before school, so I'd remember the moor was still there when the pit wasn't.

The letter from the forestry office came in April, planting crews wanted for the summer, pay by the thousand trees. I didn't tell him until the night before I left. He turned the pencil over in his fingers for a long time, then took my hand, turned it palm up under the lamp, and pressed the lead into the skin, slow and careful, tier after tier of branches narrowing to a point.

On the bus I kept my fist closed so the mark wouldn't rub off on the seat. At the first junction I opened my hand against the window. The lines had softened into a grey shadow. Beyond the car park the sun came up over the fells, and a line of dark trees stood black against the light, exactly the shape I'd been carrying all along.