Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a tree stump cross-section with growth rings and radial cracks, shown on the forearm in three stacked photographs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree ring cross-section on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo depicts a tree stump cut across its grain, with concentric growth rings radiating from a small central point and several pale radial cracks running outwards. The rings are drawn with solid black lines and fine white gaps, and the bark edge is a bold black band with a ragged outline. The image is a stack of three close photographs of the same forearm piece, all in black and grey on a plain light background.

Blackwork Forearm Wood Crack Bark

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bark came away in Brother Anselm's hands like wet felt, and beneath it the wood was pale as bread. Prior Hugh had ordered the oak down before Candlemas, before the next gale dropped another limb on the novices' garden. So Anselm worked the long saw, two strokes and a rest, until the cut reached the heart and the whole trunk groaned and settled onto its own sawdust like an old dog lying down.

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He had not expected to be asked to count. Brother Edmund, cellarer for forty years and no longer able to climb to the belfry, came hobbling out with a stick and a lantern though it was noon. He stood over the cut with the look of a man reading a letter whose contents he already knew. "Count them," he said. "The prior will want to know how old it was when the first stone went in."

So Anselm counted, tapping each ring with the blunt end of his chalk so the dust would hold a mark. The rings were tight near the centre, close as the lines of a psalter, then loosened as the years grew generous. Some were dark and broad, wet summers. Others were thin as thread, and he thought of the winter the brothers had eaten their seed corn and gone to the fields with their bellies tied in cloth. At the ninth ring the wood had split, a pale fissure running outward like a cartwheel's spoke, and Edmund set his stick down and said nothing for a long while.

"Lightning," the old man said at last. "The year the chapter house burned. I was a boy and I carried the buckets. This tree stood between the fire and the dormitory roof, and it took the strike meant for us."

Anselm finished at two hundred and eleven and did not tell the prior. He left the stump where it lay. When the novices came out at vespers they found it scrubbed clean, and Edmund sitting on its flat face with his knees stretched out, one finger tracing the rings as if they were a road he had walked many times.