Black and grey fine line tattoo of a tree growing from a globe, with leaves forming the shapes of land, across a woman's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree and leaves on a globe on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small tree sits on top of an open globe outline, and its roots and leaves spread down and across the curve to form the shapes of land. The linework is fine and dark, with stippled shading in the canopy and leaves that gives the tree some texture. The tattoo is in black ink on pale skin, centred between the shoulder blades, with the subject's hair up and a dangling earring visible at the edge of the frame.

Botanical Fine line Back Globe Tree Leaves Root Earth Planet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reunion was held in the old schoolhouse at Lower Wenlow because the village hall roof had come down in the winter, and nobody could agree where else forty grown people might sit at trestle tables. Mrs Ansell rang the cracked bell with a wooden spoon, as she always had, and the former pupils stopped talking and looked up at the map.

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The map still hung above the blackboard. It was a globe drawn in ink by a boy called Tobias Crane, who had been kept behind for a week for drawing it. He had put a single tree on the top of the world, and then let its roots run down the curve until they became the coastlines. Every child who sat beneath it was told that roots were the only honest part of any map, because roots went wherever the ground allowed them.

Tobias came late, with mud on his boots from the lane. He stood under the drawing for a long while. "They said I'd drawn it wrong," he said. "Said the land couldn't reach out over the water like that." Mrs Ansell, bent now and nearly blind, said the water had been pulling back from the village for years, and the roots had simply kept their hold. Then she took the chalk from the ledge and drew a second small tree beside the first, and nobody in the room could see what she had drawn on the board.

By morning the lane was lined with saplings, each one tied to a stake with a strip of its owner's old school scarf, and every one of them was leaning towards the sea.