Black and grey tattoo of a tall conifer tree with trailing roots running down the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tall conifer tree on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tall conifer tree with layered, tapering branches is tattooed vertically along the forearm. Its crown is shaded with fine dark strokes and grey tones, and long thin lines extend downward from the base to suggest roots. The forearm fills the centre of the frame, with a grey sleeve above and a hand with rings visible at the left edge.

Botanical Forearm Tree Conifer Root

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, child, the fire's gone low and the wind has come round off the moor. You'll want to hear this properly, for Brother Anselm told it to me the way his own abbot told it to him, and nobody in this house has ever been fool enough to tell it short.

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When the first walls went up at Scarth, there was no tree on the whole ridge taller than a man's knee. The brothers dug their cells into the rock and drank from a spring that ran thin every August. Then in the year of the great frost, a lay brother called Oswy walked down to the valley with a mule and a grudge against the wind, and came back up three days later with a young silver fir wrapped in wet sacking, its roots bound in a ball of clay as big as a loaf.

They planted it at the head of the spring, and the abbot said it would never take. Oswy slept beside it all that winter, breaking the ice off its needles with his bare hands. In spring it put out one green tier, then another, each shelf of branches narrower than the last, until it stood above the chapel roof like a finger pointing at God.

But the roots were the strange part. They went down through the rock faster than any roots had a right to, thin as harp strings, and they found the spring. Brother Anselm swore to me that you can still hear water running in the dark beneath the choir stalls, and that the roots hang down into it like the fingers of a hand dipped in a cold stream.

When Oswy died, they buried him at the tree's foot, and the next morning the topmost branch had bent over the grave like an old man bowing his head. The abbot took it for a sign. I take it for a tree that grew toward the thing it needed, which is the better miracle and the harder one to believe.