Black ink tree with bare branches and hanging roots, with small birds in flight, tattooed across the palm and inner forearm, shown with the hand raised against a pale wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree and birds across hand and forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A raised hand and inner forearm show a black ink tree whose trunk rises from the wrist and whose branches spread across the palm, with three small birds in flight above. The linework is fine and sketchy, with the trunk shaded in dense hatched strokes and roots trailing down the forearm. The image uses only black ink and grey tones against a plain light wall, with the hand centred in the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At Hollin Cross the station master's daughter kept a sycamore in a tin bath beside the ticket hatch, because her mother had told her a station needs something that stays put. Trains came and went and the sycamore never went anywhere. Nobody remembered planting it.

Keep reading

When the county decided the line needed a new bridge, surveyors came with measuring chains and a foreman who wanted the tree cut for the signal cable. Nell Ashby sat on the edge of the bath and said no. The foreman said the roots had gone under the platform and would crack it. She said then he could lift the platform, and they laughed until they saw the roots had already gone down through the sleepers and out beneath the rails, where three crows sat on the signal post watching.

The old porters said every root reached a pit where someone had left something behind: a dropped glove, a wedding ring, a letter never posted. The tree drew these up and carried them into its branches, and the birds came to see what was hung there. Nell's grandmother had known this, and had made sure one low branch was always kept clear over the ticket hatch.

The bridge was built around the tree in the end. On the first morning the 7.12 ran through, a single black bird lifted from the highest branch and flew alongside the carriages until the cutting swallowed them. Nell watched it go, then went back to her sweeping.

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