Black and grey tree tattoo with a shaded ground line on the upper arm, close to the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree silhouette on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tree with a bare trunk and dense branches stands on a shaded mound of ground. The tree is rendered in solid black ink with soft grey shading beneath it, and the design fills the upper arm. The background is dark and out of focus, so the skin and ink are the clear focus.

Botanical Upper arm Tree Landscape Branches Hill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook would not set down his water cask until the lookout had sighted land, and the lookout had been wrong twice already, so when the mate finally shouted from the fore-top the whole crew crowded to the rail. It was a low green smudge on the grey water, no bigger than a thumbnail at that distance, and on its crest, black against the morning, stood one tree. Captain Halloran's chart showed nothing there. Old Ned Parry, who had sailed with his grandfather, only pulled his cap down and said that the tree was on the hill, and that a ship which passed it without going ashore would be becalmed for a year.

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They came to anchor in the lee of the island and rowed in with the tide. The ground rose in a shallow mound, shaded grey where the grass had worn thin, and the tree grew out of the top of it with its branches spread wide enough to cover the whole crown. Under it the boy Tom Ellery found a flat stone and, beneath the stone, a tin box no larger than a biscuit tin. Inside were notched sticks, hundreds of them, each one tied with a scrap of different cloth. Ned turned them over with his thick fingers and read the notches the way his grandfather had taught him. Every stick was a ship that had passed the island and never been seen again, and every ship had been counted by someone who had come ashore to do it.

Tom asked what the stick was for, and Ned said it was for the ship that would be counted next. The boy thought about this for a long while. Then he took his knife, cut a notch into a fresh piece of ash from the lowest branch, and tied it with a strip of his own shirt. When they rowed back out the wind came up from the north like a door opening, and the tree on the hill grew smaller and darker behind them until it was only a single stroke of ink against the sky.