Black and grey tattoo of a bare tree with two child silhouettes on a swing, above script lettering, on a forearm.

Tree and swing with names on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bare tree spreads across the arm with two small silhouetted figures sitting on a swing hanging from a lower branch. Script lettering sits above the tree, with a small ampersand between two lines of text. The tree uses fine, soft grey shading and the figures are solid black, all in black ink on skin against a blue background.

Realism Lettering Forearm Tree Silhouette Script Name

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The circus Harrowgate and Dunn had been losing its tents for three winters, and by the last one there was only the big top, an old elephant named Mab who could no longer lift her feet, and the swing. Ruby Dunn, eleven, had rigged it herself from the dead oak at the edge of the field where the lorries stopped. Her brother Rhett, nine, did the pushing. Nobody else would stand under that branch anymore, because the old showman said the tree had been struck by lightning and would drop a limb on whoever sat longest.

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Their mother said the tree was only tired, the same as the rest of them. Each evening the two of them climbed onto the planks and swung higher, until their boots brushed the grey canvas of the roof and the lamps of the empty stands swam below. Rhett counted the swings aloud, and Ruby counted the crows that came to sit on the bare branches to watch. The crows, she decided, were the audience that had stayed.

In the spring the owner sold the lorries for scrap and the rest of the company drifted off to towns with paying crowds. On the final evening Ruby tied a fresh knot in the rope, the way her grandmother had taught her, and told Rhett that a tree which held two children through a hard winter had earned its keep. They walked off the field without looking back, and the swing kept turning slowly in the wind.

The field was ploughed under the following year, but the oak was too stubborn for the blade. Come autumn it was the only thing on the land still in leaf, and the crows came back to sit in it, watching the empty rope.