Black and grey realism style tattoo of a tall conifer tree running up the back of a calf, with shaded trunk and feathered branches.

Tall pine tree on a calf

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A tall conifer tree with a shaded trunk and layered, feathered branches runs vertically up the back of a bare lower leg, with the trunk tapering to a point near the ankle. The linework is fine and detailed, and the trunk uses soft grey shading against the darker branches. The tattoo is in black and grey ink against a neutral skin tone, and the photo is taken from behind with the feet and a dark textured mat visible at the bottom of the frame.

Realism Calf Pine tree Conifer Tree Forest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the fire does not take the end of this. My grandmother had it from her grandmother, who had it from a woman who knew the tree herself, so I will tell it as it was given to me. High above the salt marsh, where the ridge goes grey with rain, there was a single fir that nobody planted. A crow dropped its seed into a crack in the rock, and the seed did not care that the rock was poor.

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The fir grew thin, and then it grew tall, taller than the chapel bell rope, taller than the boats were long. The men of Hollin Cross came up with their axes every winter, and every winter they looked at its trunk, then at the sky, and went back down to their ploughs. A tree that tall, they said, must be holding something up, and nobody wanted to be the one who let it fall. So it stood, and its lower branches were stripped for kindling by children who thought nobody saw.

In the year the sea took the old mill, a boy named Corran climbed it to fetch a lost goat and came down with pitch on his hands and wonder on his face. He said that from the top you could see the whole coast in one look: the harbour, the grey islands, and a single white sail that never seemed to arrive. He said the tree was not holding anything up. It was only waiting for someone to notice it was there.

The axes came the following spring, as axes do. They felled the great fir in three days. But when they hauled the trunk down the slope, they found the stone it had grown around split clean in two, and in the cleft lay a bronze ring, green with age, that nobody in the village could account for. Corran wore it all his life. The stump is still there, and if you climb up on a clear morning you will see a new fir already reaching for the light beside it.