Black tree with roots over an orange basketball, with script reading Motivated By Jesus and Dedicated By The Game, on an arm.

Tree and basketball with script quote

Other · Mixed · Photo

A black tree with bare branches and exposed roots sits over an orange basketball, with the seams of the ball drawn in black linework. Shading on the tree and ball gives them depth, and the orange ink contrasts with the black. Black script below the ball reads Motivated By Jesus and Dedicated By The Game.

Other Tree Root Quote Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gregor had the proving baskets lined up by four, and the flour still hung in the cold light from the back window when he heard the ball. Thump, a pause, thump. Someone was already out in the yard behind the shop, and it was not the lad from the delivery van, who never came before six.

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The ash at the yard's edge had dropped its last leaves in November and stood now like a pen drawing of itself, its roots heaving the cobbles where the bins were chained. Somebody had screwed a rusted hoop to the wall of the old coal store, the net long gone, the rim the colour of a burnt crust. Mae Dawson, who had worked the counter for thirty-one years, was dribbling a ball whose orange had worn to brown along the seams.

'Bread's not ready,' he said. 'Neither am I,' she said, and tucked the ball against her hip. The leisure centre court was locked until seven and her knees had opinions about the church hall stairs, so this was what she had. Her Ray used to say a man could shoot with the same hands whether he was thinking about God or the box score, and that the tree had never once asked him which. Gregor had never known what to say to that, so he took the ball off her and squared up under the rim.

The shot clanged off the iron and dropped down into the roots, where it sat in a hollow like an egg. Mae laughed, low, and said it was the best he would manage all week. Behind them the first oven door swung open with a sigh of heat, and the light came up grey and then gold across the yard, finding the ball, the tree's black hands, and the old hoop that nobody had had the heart to take down.