Black ink tree tattoo with thin branches and a cross-shaped trunk on the upper back, seen from behind in a mirror selfie.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree tattoo on the upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair tied up is photographed from behind, showing a black tattoo of a bare-branched tree on the upper back near the base of the neck. The linework is fine and even, with the branches spreading out at the top and a long trunk that ends in a cross shape. The ink is solid black against pale skin, and the plain background shows a bathroom mirror.

Botanical Back Tree Branches Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old ash by the chapel wall had been dead since the winter the Maid of Penwith went out and didn't come back, and nobody in Porthmellin would say so aloud, so it fell to me to go up the ladder with the bow saw. My father had been sexton before me and his father before him, and between us we had dug most of the graves on the hill above the harbour, so a dead tree was hardly the worst thing I'd climbed over.

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Mrs Tregenza came down on the Tuesday with a flask of tea and a drawing on the back of a chandler's invoice. She didn't want the trunk cut to a stump. She wanted it left long and bare, with the branches forking out at the top like frost on a window, and a cross set where the crown should have been. I said a cross on a tree was a churchyard sort of thing. She said that was rather the point, and poured the tea into the flask lid for me to drink standing up.

So I left the trunk tall and took the branches off in fine, careful forks, the way Dennis used to whip the ends of the rigging so the rope wouldn't chafe. He had gone out on her eleven years ago, and his dinner plate had sat on Mrs Tregenza's hob every night since, turned face down, which she said was so the gulls would think she'd eaten. When the cross went on, the low sun came off the water and threw its shadow straight down the trunk to the wall, and she stood there a long while with the flask in both hands.

"There," she said, quite plainly, "that's where he'd stand to watch us come in." I didn't argue. I went back up the ladder for the last small fork, and she kept her eyes on the shadow until the light went off the harbour.