Black ink tree of life with a sun and crescent moon on a woman's upper back, photographed from behind, in a botanical style.

Tree of life with sun and moon on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large tree with leafy branches and exposed roots sits within a circular outline, with a sun on the left and a crescent moon on the right. The linework is bold and solid black, with no shading. The design is centred between the shoulder blades on bare skin, with a plain light background.

Botanical Back Tree Tree of life Sun Moon Leaves Root Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ash at the far end of platform two had been lifting the paving for longer than anyone at Hollin Cross could remember. Every spring the district surveyor came up from Carlisle with his clipboard, stood under its branches, wrote something down and went away again having decided nothing. Maureen Pell, who had sold tickets from the window for thirty-one years, said it would outlast the lot of them, and she had never once been wrong about a tree.

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She opened the booking hall at half past five, when the sun cleared the goods shed and laid a bar of light across the sleepers. By then the ash had already caught it on the eastern side of the crown, while the rest of the branches still held their shadow. At night it worked the other way round. The crescent moon slid behind the signal box and the ash went silver along its far edge, so the platform seemed to hold two trees, one for each shift, and neither of them asked permission.

The night the 22:14 was cancelled for flood water on the viaduct, Maureen stayed late with the last guard, a lad called Danny Ruddock who was frightened of the dark. They sat on the bench under the roots with a flask between them while rain came down the hill. He asked her why the surveyor never cut it. She said a railway was only a long argument about where things should go, and the tree had simply picked its side and waited.

By morning the water had gone down and Danny had gone home to his mother's. Maureen found a green shoot pushing up through the crack in the platform, its leaves no bigger than a fingernail, one half lit by the sunrise and the other still in the shadow of the signal box. She left it where it was and didn't mention it to the surveyor.