Black fine line tattoo of a tree stump with a heart carving, grass tufts and handwritten script reading and the boy did and the tree was happy, across the top of a foot.

Tree stump and script quote on a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a tree stump with a carved heart on its top, set among sketched grass tufts, with a line of cursive script beneath reading and the boy did and the tree was happy. The linework is thin and slightly hand-drawn, with simple uniform outlines and no shading. The image is black ink only, shown on a bare foot against a black glove and a white sheet.

Fine line Lettering Other Heart Grass Script Quote Foot

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tamsin Varley had been sent to the far field on Scarrow to cut back the blackthorn, and she found the stump before she found the wind. It stood at the edge of the marram, grey as an old tooth, with a heart cut into its top so long ago that the bark had grown up around the lips of it. Her grandfather had said the boy who carved it used to sit there every evening, whistling at the gulls until the light went out of the sea.

Keep reading

Nobody on Scarrow spoke of the boy now. He had gone across to the mainland with a ferryman's boots and a pocket of salt fish, and he came back only once, grey himself, to find the tree gone and the stump left like a footstool. He had sat on it, the woman at the shop said, and wept into his hands until the tide came up over his ankles and someone had to fetch him.

Tamsin did not believe the weeping part. She knelt and brushed the grass from the heart and found initials cut underneath it, smaller, as if the carver had been ashamed of how much he wanted. Something moved in the marram, a hare or the shadow of one. She laughed at herself and sat down on the stump, which was warm from the afternoon, and the sea came in quietly below the cliff.

She went back for her knife in the end and cut a small crooked hook beside the old heart, and then she left the blackthorn standing where it was. The island had always had a use for things that gave, and she thought the stump would probably forgive her for taking a rest on it.