Colour botanical tree tattoo with green foliage and a handwritten black script quote across the upper back, with a small star tattoo near the neck.

Tree and script quote across a back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A bare back shows a large tree tattoo with a bare brown trunk and branches that rise up the left side and spread into green foliage. Black handwritten script runs in lines across the upper back and into the canopy, with a small star tattoo near the top right of the frame. The tree is shaded in soft greens and browns, and the script is set in dark ink above the foliage, with the subject shown from behind.

Botanical Lettering Back Tree Foliage Branches Trunk Script Handwriting Quote Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clerk Anselm had been sent up to Lessmoor to count apples, and he had counted them twice before he noticed the ash on the north terrace had gone green overnight. Its trunk still stood as it always had, grey and knotted as old rope, but from the crown downward the branches were heavy with leaves, and the leaves were marked with small dark strokes, like writing in a hand he could not read.

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The steward, a stooped woman named Hedda Brume, did not look up from her ledger. "Those are thoughts," she said. "Not yours, or not only yours. The ash takes what people leave lying about in their heads when they stand too long beneath it, and it grows them into leaves. Every clerk who comes up here believes himself the gardener. Mostly he is only the soil."

Anselm laughed, then stopped, because he remembered his own thoughts from the road: that the tithe was unjust, that the abbot drank, that nobody had ever asked him what he wanted. He found them on the lowest leaves in his own cramped script, and beneath them, pale and new, a sentence he had not thought at all. He read it twice and his hand went cold on the ledger.

That evening he climbed the terrace with a knife and a basket, meaning to cut the branches clean. Hedda watched from the gate. He cut one bough, then another, and each fell with the sound of pages turning, until the terrace was strewn with words. By morning the ash was bare again, and Anselm had gone down the hill without his ledger, carrying only the one leaf he had not been able to bring himself to cut.