Black ink drawing of a tree stump cross-section, with concentric growth rings, radial cracks and a bark-like edge, on textured white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree stump cross-section design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A circular design shows a tree stump cut across the grain, with concentric growth rings radiating from a small central core. Fine, slightly wobbly black linework forms the rings and cracks, while the outer bark edge is drawn with a heavier, ragged black border. The design is rendered in solid black ink on off-white textured paper, with the subject centred and surrounded by plain space.

Botanical Wood Bark

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The oak came down the week the lane flooded, so by the time Dad and the Hardcastle boys had dragged it to the verge, the bark was already lifting like old wallpaper. You kneel on the cut face with a pencil stub and a ruler pinched from school, and you start counting from the outside in, because the outside is the easy part.

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Thirty-one rings in, the lines stop being neat. A crack runs out from the middle like a river on a map, and where it crosses a thick band you know the dry summer Mrs Penrose still talks about, when the millpond went to cracked mud and the village slaughtered its pigs early. The crack is wider on one side. Frost got in there, or a boy with a hatchet who wanted to see what was inside.

Near the heart the rings bunch tight, close as the teeth of a comb. Someone has scratched a small cross into the bark where the first ring begins, the way the old carters used to mark trees they had promised to come back for.

You stop when the pencil runs out of lead. Ninety-four. Your grandmother was born in the year you would mark on the twelfth ring from the middle, and you wonder which of the thin years was hers. You sweep the dust into your palm, carry the round to the woodshed, and set it face up so the rings can keep their own time for once.