Small black fine line tree with leaves above the words grow up, tattooed on the upper back of a person with long hair pulled to one side.

Small tree and grow up on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small tree with a rounded canopy of leaves and a thin trunk sits above the words grow up in a simple handwritten script. The linework is fine and dark, with the leaves drawn as small outlined shapes and little shading. The ink is black against pale skin, and the tattoo is centred on the upper back below the neckline, with a gold chain and a black strap visible in the frame.

Fine line Botanical Back Tree Leaves Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the kettle's only just gone off and I'm not telling this to a room full of wet coats. You want the tree? Everybody wants the tree. Up on the top field above Porthallow there was one ash, bent over like an old man reading a tide table, and nothing grew under it but nettles and grudges. Then Nan Carew's boy Tom went out on the Brenda Ann with his father in the spring of fifty-eight, and when the weather came round the Lizard they never came back in.

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After the service, Nan walked up that field every morning with a jam jar of harbour water and a trowel. She poured it at the roots of a sapling nobody had planted, a little thing with leaves the size of a fingernail, and the chapel women said she'd gone soft. Nan said it was the only thing on the headland that stood up straight in a gale and never once asked to be let go. Each morning she told it to grow up, the same words she'd said to Tom across the kitchen table with his boots in his hands.

Years went by the way they do in fishing villages, all at once and then nothing. The sapling spread its arms over the path and filled into a round crown, and Nan's knuckles knotted like the trunk itself. When she could no longer climb the field, the lads carried her up in a chair on Sundays so she could sit in the shade and watch the boats come round.

She died the winter the old wheelhouse of the Brenda Ann was broken up for firewood. The next spring her grandson Jory walked to the top field with a jam jar in each hand, one of seawater and one of tea, because he couldn't decide which she'd have wanted. He poured both. When he came down, a dozen small boys from the harbour were already running under the branches, reaching up to touch the low leaves as they passed, and not one of them knew why. That's the tree, my handsome. Now who's having the last biscuit?