Black ink drawing of a tree trunk shaped like a spine, with a songbird, an apple, ivy, branches and mushrooms, in a botanical style with no body placement shown.

Tree trunk spine with bird and apple

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A vertical design of a tree trunk arranged like a spine, with knotted bark, a small songbird on one side, a hanging apple near the top, and a leafy branch with a small cocoon. Mushrooms and ivy spread along the lower half. The drawing uses fine pen linework and hatching in black ink on a cream background, with the subject centred and the outline fading toward the bottom.

Botanical Spine Bird Apple Mushroom Branch Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the ladder, Tom, it's older than your father and twice as honest. Leave the windfalls be. That blackbird has been eyeing them since Tuesday and he's earned a few. Now sit, and I'll tell you about the Pennick tree, because you've been staring at it all morning like it owes you money.

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The Pennick tree was a cider apple that grew so straight the old folk said it had a backbone. When the storm took the top of it in the winter of the big frost, nobody had the heart to burn the trunk. They stood it up again, bolted it to a post, and left it there with its bark still knotted like knuckles. Mushrooms came up through the lower rings the first wet spring, pale as a row of bishops' hats. Ivy came after them, climbing the way ivy always does, slow and certain, as if it had a grudge against the sky.

A nuthatch moved into the split at the crown that same year and refused to leave. Every morning it walked head first down the bark, cheeky as a clerk, pecking out whatever the damp had begun. Mrs Pennick said it was doing the tree a kindness. My grandfather said it was just hungry. The apple that hung from the top never fell, not once, and on a twig beside it a cocoon hung through three winters, pale and patient, until one May morning it was simply empty and the bird sat beside it, looking pleased with itself.

So when the council man came round asking for the trunk as firewood, I told him no. Pass me that small knife. You can carve your name in the post if you like, but mind the grain. It's the only spine in Kent that still keeps its bird.