Black linework tattoo of tree roots and bark spreading across the back of a hand and over the fingers, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree roots tattoo across a hand

Botanical · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A pale hand with a tattoo of gnarled tree roots and bark that runs from the wrist across the back of the hand and down the fingers. The linework is dense, dark and hatched, with heavier shadowing in the trunk area near the knuckles. The ink is black on light skin, and the plain grey background keeps the focus on the design.

Botanical Hand Tree Root Bark

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The men from the water board had given up on the ash by the lych gate, but Edith Carew still went out every morning with a bucket of cold tea to pour along the cut roots. Nobody in Harrowdene could say when the tree had come up through the churchyard wall. It had simply been there, its bark gone black in the rain, its roots spreading under the lanes like the veins on an old woman's wrist.

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Her grandson Tom came home from the city with a leather case and a crooked grin. He said the roots were just roots, that they would drink the cellar dry before the next winter, and he would pull them out himself with a mattock. On the third night he went out with a lamp and a saw. Edith heard the blade stop, then start again, then stop for good.

In the morning the lamp lay in the lane, still lit, and a single root had pushed up through the cobbles beside it, thick as a wrist and bristling with fine grey fingers. Edith knelt, pressed her palm flat to the bark, and felt it warm. She poured out the last of the tea and said his name once, the way you call a dog in from the rain.

By June the roots had reached the rectory, the postbox and the step of the shop, and people stopped complaining about them. Edith kept the bucket by the gate. Some evenings the lane creaked like the timbers of an old boat, and she hummed the tune Tom used to whistle so the roots would know someone was still at home.