White line drawing of a tree of life design with a human figure in the trunk, arms raised into the branches, on a grey background, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life with a figure in the trunk

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical tree of life fills a circle, with a small human figure standing in the trunk and arms raised up into the branches. The drawing uses fine, delicate white outlines and hatched lines for the bark, roots and leaves. It is shown in white on a plain muted grey-brown background with no colour.

Botanical Tree of life Tree Figure Branches Leaves Root

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ash on the spoil tip had leaves again the week they brought the men up from the north shaft, and my mother said that was a lie, because nothing green grew on the tip. Nothing had grown there since before I was born, only grey shale and the blue smoke that crept along it when the rain came. But I climbed up anyway with a jam jar under my arm, because Tom Hebden swore he had seen a woman standing in the trunk with her arms raised, and I wanted to see her before the grown-ups did.

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She was there, or the bark was. A pale shape the length of my hand, rising through the knots with her arms lifted into the branches as if she were holding the sky up off the pit. The roots came out of the shale like white rope, and when I knelt to look, they were wet, though the day had been dry. I put my palm flat on the nearest one. It was warm, the way the pit baths were warm after a shift, when the water still held the day's heat.

My father had been under the ground eleven years and had never once told me what it was like down there. He came up grey and quiet and ate his tea with his back to the range. I told the tree that, which was daft, and then I told it about the jar, and how the lid would not screw on. Something ticked in the branches above me, like an engine cooling, and a leaf turned over in the still air and came down slow, landing on my knee.

I took it home in the jar. My mother looked at the leaf on the kitchen table for a long time, then went to put the kettle on without a word. On Saturday the men went back down with their lamps lit, and I went up the tip alone to count the new leaves. Eleven. When I told my mother, she nodded as if she had been counting too.