Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a tall tree with a short ground line on the upper arm, set against a blue cloth.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stippled tree on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single tall tree with a full, rounded canopy and a slender trunk stands on a short horizontal ground line. The canopy is built from dense stippled dots that shade from dark centre to lighter edges, with some fine linework on the trunk and branches. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on a plain background of skin, with a blue fabric at the left edge of the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Tree Conifer

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lodgers had started taking bets on whether the pine would come down before the September gales, and Mrs Abernethy had started charging them a penny each to keep the book. She had planted the tree herself the year her husband left the boarding house to her and went back to sea, and she would not hear a word against it. I cleaned the rooms that summer for four shillings a week and listened to the bets while I made the beds.

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The tree stood alone on a strip of sand-coloured grass behind the back gate, taller than the house, with a crown so full and round that the washing line disappeared into it. From the kitchen window it looked almost black at the centre, as if the wind had never got in there. Mr Pell, who painted seascapes in the front room and never sold one, said the whole thing was a drawing of a tree that had been rubbed out at the edges. I thought the dark was made of a thousand small marks, each one put down by hand, and that was why it held together.

In the third week of August a limb cracked in the night and hung down over the gate, swinging like a gate itself. I took the coil of rope from the shed and climbed, because nobody else in the house would. Up in the dense middle the needles closed around me and the noise of the sea dropped away. Two sparrows were nesting in a fork, and they did not even trouble to fly off when I tied the broken branch to its neighbour.

In the morning the rain had washed the crown clean, and every bristle was beaded with light. Mrs Abernethy stood at the gate with her hand on the bark and paid me a shilling for the rope, then took the penny from Mr Pell's bet and dropped it into the tin without a word.