Black linework tattoo of a tree of life with curling branches and roots, and a stylised female figure in the trunk, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swirling tree of life on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tree with spiral-curled branches and roots fills the forearm, with a stylised female figure outlined in the trunk and arms raised above the head. The design uses uniform black single-line work with no shading, and the flowing scrolls give it a repeating, ornamental pattern. The tattoo is shown head-on against a pale background, with the whole design in frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, you, and mind the nets. Now, the tree at the end of Gull Quay was never a tree at all, not to begin with. It was rope. Old Maud Tremayne twisted it from hemp in the winter of the great wreck, one yarn at a time, and every curl in it is a turn of the lay, the way she was taught by her father, who was taught by his.

Keep reading

She had a lamp in the rope loft and a man out past the Brisons who had not come in. The story says she worked all night, and when the spirals ran out she hung the rope from the gable of the chandlery and climbed into it with her arms up, the way you'd wave a boat through the bar. Her branches reached for the harbour, and every scroll on them curled back toward the water, because that is where anything lost comes home from.

The man came in on the morning tide, with his hand bleeding and his boots full of brine. He said the light had come up through the sea like a green tree in the deep, every branch pointing him to the channel. Maud said she had only been tying knots. Her neighbours laughed at her for it.

Here is the part that matters. Maud's roots went down into the quay stones, her hair went grey in a single night, and the rope never rotted after. Go and look at it if you don't believe me. Count the curls. They always come out one short of what you counted last time, and that is the one she keeps for whoever's still out there.

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