Black and grey geometric tattoo on a man's upper back and shoulder, showing a tree with a checked trunk, a sun, faces and a hand, with a small green bird and dashed line running onto the upper arm.

Surreal tree and hand on upper back

Geometric · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper back and shoulder, with a tree with a chequered black trunk and bare branches at its centre, a tan sun above it, and angular pine shapes and abstract faces around it. A small bird with a green wing sits on the shoulder, and a dashed line leads down to a hand holding a thin stem on the upper arm. The linework is bold and solid in places and stippled or hatched in others, mostly black and grey with small areas of green and ochre, and a framed design sheet showing the same artwork is visible behind.

Geometric Back Shoulder Upper arm Tree Sun Hand Bird Face Pine tree Dashed line Geometric shape Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The 6.14 to Carrowby was cancelled for the third time in a week, and by nine o'clock the platform at Hollin Cross held only Ruth Ashdown, a trolley of stopped clocks and a greenfinch that kept hopping onto the ticket machine to peck at the buttons. Ruth had been left in charge of lost property since Mr Pell retired, which meant a cardboard box, a ledger with a broken spine and a rule nobody had ever written down: anything unclaimed after a year went to the hill.

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Nobody knew which hill. The porters called it the Tally, a bald green rise behind the goods yard where one hawthorn grew out of a stone wall. Ruth had walked it once with Mr Pell, who carried a bag of unclaimed umbrellas up the slope and came back without them. In the back of the ledger she found a dashed line drawn in pencil on a torn timetable, running from the platform clock down to a hand holding a thin stem, and beside it, in a shaky hand, the words: leave it where it can see the train.

On Friday she carried the box up the Tally in the rain. The hawthorn had gone bare for winter, its branches black against a sky the colour of old pennies, and the wall beneath it was furred with moss. She pressed the stopped clocks into the stones one by one, faces outward, so their hands pointed down the valley towards the line. The sun came out for a minute, low and pale, and laid the tree's shadow long across the grass.

When she got back, the greenfinch was waiting on the signal post at the end of the platform. It flew to her shoulder, then up the hill, and she watched it settle among the branches just as the 6.14 came round the bend, two hours late and lit like a lantern. Ruth opened the ledger and wrote: one bird, claimed.