Black ink bare tree with roots and small falling leaves above the word Hope in cursive script on a forearm.

Tree and Hope script on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black ink tree with bare branches, a trunk that spreads into roots, and small dots above it suggesting falling leaves. The word Hope sits beneath the tree in flowing cursive script. The linework is clean and solid black with no visible shading, and the image is shot close up on pale skin against a dark background.

Botanical Lettering Forearm Tree Root Leaves Hope Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

'Mind the rope, it's older than your father,' Nell said, pulling the children back from the towpath as the narrowboat slid past the lock. 'You want the willow at Hatch Bend or not? Then sit down and keep your hands inside the cabin.'

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The willow had stood there longer than the canal itself, bare as a fishing net every winter, its branches combed out black against the sky. Each November it shed its leaves onto the water, and each November the boatmen cursed the mess and rowed through it anyway. One winter Tobias Greave, who hauled coal on the Oxford run and had run out of patience years before, took his axe to it. 'Dead wood,' he said. 'Warms the stove for a month.'

Nell told him a tree does not die in a single season. It only lets go of what it cannot carry through the cold, and it keeps its roots down in the clay, waiting. Tobias didn't listen. The third blow split the bark, and sap welled up bright in the frost. He dropped the axe, left the stump where it lay, and went home without his supper.

By April a single green shoot had pushed up from the cut. Tobias, who had said nothing all winter, came down to the bow of his boat with a tin of black paint and a brush worn to a point. He lettered a word along the side in looping strokes, and when the children asked what it said, he told them to read it slowly, the way you'd sound out a stranger's name. Nell never once told him he'd been right to stop. She only said the roots had been working all along.