Traditional colour tattoo of a green tree with red fruit and two banners reading and she loved and little boy, on a calf.

Tree with banner script on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of a tree with a thick brown trunk, green leaves and small red fruit runs up the calf. Two orange banners with dark outlines cross the design, carrying partly visible script that reads 'and she loved' and 'little boy'. Bold black outlines and flat fills are used throughout, with grass tufts at the base, against a plain skin background with a patterned rug and wooden surface behind.

Traditional Calf Tree Leaves Apple Banner Ribbon Script Grass Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The apple tree had been planted the year the boarding house took its first lodger, and by August it was heavy enough to need a broom handle propping under the bough. Ada Pringle stood at the scullery window with a tea towel over her shoulder and counted the boy's trips. Eleven since breakfast. Tom Ferris, nine, sleeves shoved up past his elbows, went up the trunk as though it owed him money, and came down with his pockets bulging red.

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"You'll give yourself a belly ache," she called from the back step. "And leave the bark alone. It's not a noticeboard." He had carved a T into the grey wood below the second fork, and a crooked heart beside it that she had pretended not to see. He held out a windfall with a bruise down one side. "It's for you, Mrs P. It's the best one."

Ada took it, because refusing a child's gift was something her mother had never let her do. The lodgers came and went all summer, but Tom stayed on into September, when the council letter arrived about the new sea wall and two men with measuring tapes walked the length of the garden. The tree was marked on their plan with a small cross. She read the letter twice, then went out and sat under the branches with the boy's apple in her lap.

The saw came in October. Tom was back at his school in Yeovil by then, and a postcard arrived with a pencil drawing of a tree with its arms flung wide. She pinned it above the sink. She kept the windfall on the sill until it shrank to a hard brown knot, and she didn't throw it out.