Close-up of a black fine line tree with roots on the inner forearm, with the script words I climbed the tree to see the world beneath it.

Tree and quote on the inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tree with a shaded canopy and branching trunk sits above a short ground line with roots, all in dark ink. Beneath it, handwritten script reads I climbed the tree to see the world, set in lines that run down the forearm. The photograph is warm and sepia-toned, with a soft blurred green background that keeps focus on the wrist and text.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Tree Root Quote Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still, you, and stop kicking the bench. The guard has taken the bus driver's papers again and we will be here until the sun gives up, so you may as well have the story about my brother Tomas and the plane tree. Everybody in Berevo knows it, but the ones from the far side of the river tell it wrong.

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The tree stood where the two countries pretended to meet, its roots running under the wire on both sides so that nobody could say whose ground it stood on. Tomas was nine when he decided the top of it was the only place a man could see the whole border at once. He climbed on a dare from the customs boy, who was then a sergeant, and he sat in the crown with a wet cloth tied against the sun, shouting down what he saw. A goat with a bell. A lorry with no lights. A woman hanging washing on the wrong side of the fence. Then he cupped his hands and called out the words he had been practising all week: I climbed the tree to see the world.

Nobody came to fetch him for most of an afternoon. By the time his mother had walked down with her stick, guards from both sides had gathered under the branches, arguing about whose job it was to bring a boy down from a tree. In the end the old officer with the glass eye climbed up himself, and when he reached Tomas he did not take him down. He sat beside him instead. They looked at the world together until the shadows came across the road.

So when you ask why I never crossed to see the sea, I tell you Tomas already did it for both of us, from the top of that tree, and he came down and told us the colour of it. Now hand me that blanket. The bus is going nowhere, and the guard has seen us watching him, which means he will ask for the papers twice.