Black ink sketch of a tree above the handwritten words I climbed the tree to see the world on a forearm.

Tree and quote on the inner forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand-drawn tree with a shaded canopy and thin trunk sits above a line of handwritten script that reads I climbed the tree to see the world. The linework is fine and sketchy, with the canopy built from dense hatching and stippled marks. The ink is black on a warm, sepia-toned photograph, with the wrist and hand visible at the top of the frame.

Lettering Botanical Forearm Tree Quote Handwritten text Script Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our tree stood on the tip of Hollin Bank, where the slag heap ran out and the grass began, and it was the only thing in Ashcombe that nobody had ever owned. My brother Dennis said the coal company had forgotten it, the way they forgot everything that didn't come up in a tub. He was eleven and certain of most things. I was nine and had a bad knee, so I went up slower, one hand on the bark and the other holding the string of my plimsoll.

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The shift whistle went at two. From the third branch you could see the whole valley: the chapel roof, the pithead wheel turning like a slow clock, the row of back-to-backs with their washing going grey in the wind. You could see the road out to Wakefield too, where the lorries went. I counted them every afternoon and wrote the number on my hand in biro. My mother said it was disgusting, and then, the day I showed her the men had come back up safe, she didn't say anything about it at all.

Dennis went down the pit that spring. He was fourteen by the paperwork, which everyone knew was a fiction, and he left his tin of conkers on my windowsill with a note that said just keep them dry.

I still climb it, though the knee is worse. The tree is smaller than I remember and the view is mostly car park now. But when I reach the high fork I write the day's number on the inside of my wrist, and then I look for the road, because someone always comes back up it.