Black linework tattoo of a tree with a leafy canopy, two long trunks and grass, beside the quotation 'and she loved a little boy very, very much even more than she loved herself', with grey shading at

Tree and quotation tattoo on the side of the body

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black linework tattoo shows a tree with a dense, outlined leafy canopy across the top and two long, thin trunks reaching down to a patch of grass. A typeset quotation runs down the right side in black serif-style lettering, and grey shading sits beneath the grass and roots. The image is a close crop of bare skin, and the design is entirely in black and grey.

Lettering Ribs Tree Leaves Trunk Grass Text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boy came down to the shore every morning that summer, and every morning the old elm on Carrick Head shook its leaves over him as he passed. He had a red cap, bare feet, and a habit of talking to gulls as if they owed him money. His mother kept the lamp at the top of the cliff path, and she said the tree was there to keep the wind off the lamp, which was true, though it was not the whole truth.

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The elm's roots went down through the rock to the tide line, and it grew so thick that the fishwives sat in its shade to mend their nets. When the boy was small he climbed it and it held him. When he grew too big to climb he lay beneath it and it shaded him. When he wanted a boat, it gave him its branches, one after another, until the hull was built and the boy was gone out past the point with the sail up. The elm stood bare and thin against the sky, with nothing left to give but its trunk and the grass at its feet.

Years later the boat came back with a grey-haired man at the tiller, tired and quiet, with no reason to sail anywhere else. He hauled the keel onto the shingle and walked up the path to the stump. He sat down on it. The elm said nothing, having nothing left to say, and the man did not expect it to. He only wanted somewhere to rest his back.

The wind dropped and the tide turned. A green shoot pushed up from the cut wood beside his boot, and he watched it for a while before he pulled his cap down over his eyes and let the grass grow up around his ankles.