Black and grey realism tattoo of a cut tree stump with growth rings and a split running up from the centre, across the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree stump growth rings on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a cross-section of a tree stump, with dense concentric growth rings radiating outward from a small dark core. A pale line runs from the centre up towards the top of the design, suggesting a split or crack in the wood. The work is done in black ink and grey shading, with fine linework around the rings and softer, heavier shading at the edges, and it fills most of the upper arm in a close crop.

Realism Upper arm Wood Crack Bark

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The elm came down the week the tide took the old slipway, and Dad said it would never season right with a shake like that running up through the heart. He was wrong about that, as he was about most wood. I climbed onto the stump that first evening with a candle and a pencil, counting the rings the way he had taught me, one ring a year, dark for the hard winters and pale where the summers ran long.

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There were a hundred and forty-one of them. The crack ran from the core outward, and where it split, the wood had gone grey and soft, like the pulp of a sodden letter. Dad used to say a tree remembers every bad year in its grain, and you can read them if you are patient and do not mind getting your hands dirty. I found the year the sea came over the quay wall. I found the summer my mother went to Plymouth and did not come back for a month. I found the winter nothing grew at all.

The harbour folk brought their boats to us to be mended, and the stump sat in the yard for three months while the men argued over whether it was fit for a keel. In the end we sawed a plank from the sound side and left the rest for the gulls and the rain. The crack kept its line through the grey wood, pale as a vein, and the children still stepped over the place where it ran on their way to school without knowing what they were stepping over.

I went back last autumn with my pencil and found I could not remember which ring was which. The middle years had gone soft in my head, like the wood. So I sat on the stump in the rain and counted from the outside in, past everything I had lived through, until I reached the one I had been avoiding. Then I put the pencil away.