Black and grey tattoo of a tree with roots, blossoms and butterflies across a woman's back, photographed from behind.

Tree and butterflies across a back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large tree tattoo spans the back, with a trunk that widens into spreading roots at the base and a canopy of blossoms and small flying insects. Several butterflies sit among the branches and drift outwards towards the shoulders. The linework and soft shading are in black and grey, and the subject is framed centrally against a graffiti wall.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the old pear tree on Scarrow Head put out its blossom before anything else on the coast, and every spring the keeper's daughter, Mairi Lowe, climbed its crooked trunk to count the butterflies that lifted off the branches. Her father said they were only moths in better clothes. She said they were the tree's messages, and that she could read them if she held still long enough.

Keep reading

The fishermen of Gull Cove did not believe her until the winter the fog came in grey for six weeks and the light on the head went dark because the lamp oil had frozen in the tank. The boats were out. Mairi went up the tree at dusk with a candle in a jar and waited. When the first butterflies rose from the roots, pale as ash, they flew out over the water in a line, came back, and circled the cove three times before settling on the rocks where the men would land.

The men came in by the sound of those wings, or so the story goes, and they told it in every harbour after: that the tree had roots deeper than the cliff and branches that reached further than the sea. Mairi grew old on Scarrow Head and kept the tree. When she died they found her ledger, and in it, every spring, a single line of tally marks, one for each boat that had come home.

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