Black and grey dotwork tree with spreading roots and star-like flecks inside a rectangular frame, on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree and roots in a dotwork frame on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A leafless-style tree with a full canopy of pointed leaves and a network of roots fills a rectangular panel on the inner forearm. The tree is left as clean skin in negative space, while the background is built from dense black dots and small star-like sparkles around it. The image is a close crop in black and grey, with the frame sitting centrally on the arm.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Tree Root Leaves Star Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last goods train of the night slid through Hollin Cross at twenty past eleven, and Tom Peverell logged it in the signal book with the same careful hand he used for everything. Beyond the box window the old oak stood at the end of platform two, visible only as a black shape against the yard lamps.

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The company's men had come in March with a letter about the new canopy and the drainage. Tom had read it twice in the mess room. The oak had been planted in 1911 by Margaret Haskell, the stationmaster's wife, who used to hang a paraffin lamp in the window for her husband's late turns. Her roots had gone under the platform and into the culverts, and Tom knew it because he had shown the surveyor the cracked tiles himself.

At midnight he took a torch and a flask out onto the platform. The sky had cleared, and the stars were thick enough that the yard lamps could not drown them. He sat on the bench beneath the trunk and counted them the way his mother had counted lit windows along the terrace. Under the bench a root had forced its way up through a joint and split the tile clean through, and in the split a sycamore seedling had opened two leaves no bigger than a thumbnail.

He did not ring the depot. He tore a strip from the back of the duty roster and wrote, in pencil, that the roots were older than the culverts and that someone should look before anyone looked at the drains. He pressed the seedling flat under a stone so the lamp would not catch it, then went back to the box for the twelve-forty freight, which came through on time, as it always did.