Black botanical tattoo of a cross formed from a leafy tree with a Proverbs 3:18 script beneath it, on a person's upper back.

Tree cross with Proverbs 3:18 script on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black tattoo on the upper back shows a cross whose upright is a tree trunk and whose crossbar is formed by branches with leaves. Beneath it, a black cursive script reads Proverbs 3:18. The ink is black only, set against plain skin with the subject's long hair falling over one shoulder.

Botanical Lettering Back Cross Tree Leaves Branches Script Bible verse

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The axe was already on Edric Maddox's shoulder when he noticed the ash had grown wrong. Its trunk ran up the chapel side of the crossroads in the old straight line, but at the height of a man's reach the branches had flung themselves out on either side, level as a yoke, and every leaf was turned toward the road.

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The magistrate of Hollin Vale had paid for the felling. The bridge needed timber, and the ash had been a hazard since the autumn gales split its crown. Edric had sharpened the blade three evenings running, and each evening the crossing of boughs seemed a little more like something that was watching him.

His daughter Ilse came up the lane with a basket of bread and found him standing still. 'You're not swinging,' she said. 'I'm reckoning,' he said. 'Reckon faster. The bread's going cold.' She set the basket on the wall and looked up the way he had. 'Grandmother used to say that tree was the only honest thing in the parish. Took the rain without asking thanks and gave the birds a place to sleep.'

He thought of the line the old priest had painted on the chapel lintel, about wisdom being a tree of life to all who held fast to her, and how happy was the one who kept her. He had never liked that verse. Happiness seemed too soft a word for a labourer's ground. Yet he lowered the axe and leaned it against the wall beside the bread. The next morning he sent word to the magistrate that the bridge would be built from larch brought up from the coast, and that the ash would stand another winter. Before he left the crossroads he cut a small mark into its bark at the height of his shoulder, a short line crossing a longer one, so the next man with an axe would know whose tree it was.