Black and grey tattoo of a twisting tree with a perched bird and a dotwork cube pattern on a person's ribs.

Tree and geometric cube tattoo on ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A twisting tree with bare branches fills the side of the torso, with a small bird perched among the limbs and a cloud-like arrangement of dots above it. Fine linework and stippled dotwork define the trunk, branches and roots, and the base of the trunk rests on a geometric pattern of shaded cubes and triangles. The image is in black and grey, shown in a close, slightly angled view of the skin.

Dotwork Geometric Botanical Ribs Tree Bird Cube Geometric pattern Dot Branches Root Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cuttings came aboard at Lisbon in a crate the size of a coffin, lashed to the main hatch by a clerk who would not say what was inside. Mr Halloran, our second mate, gave it a kick and said they would be dead before the Azores. I was carpenter then, and keeping the cargo dry was my business, so on the third night out I prised the lid off to look.

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Inside, packed in wet sacking, were six whips of a grey-barked tree I had never seen, bare as February and twisted like rope laid up the wrong way. Someone had bedded their roots in small wooden cubes, each painted black on three faces and white on the others. When the lantern swung over them the cubes seemed to tip, first one way and then the other. I counted forty-two that night, set in rings like the petals of a flower. I drew the pattern on the back of my rule book so I would not lose it, and the drawing is still in my coat.

On the fifth day a small brown bird came down out of the rigging and perched on the crate lid as if it had been sent for. Halloran swore it was an omen. The cook swore it meant we would raise Brazil by Sunday. I only noticed that it watched the cuttings the way a man watches a letter he has been waiting on. It stayed until the wind dropped, then went off over the rail without a sound.

We reached Recife with four of the six alive. A buyer with a cart took them up the hill, and I never learned whose garden they went into. Years later a man in a Liverpool pub showed me a photograph of a courtyard tree, bare and twisting, with a ring of dots drawn above it like frost on a window. He said the roots ran down into a stone of shaded cubes that nobody could account for. I bought him a drink and did not tell him about the rule book.