Black and grey tree tattoo across the upper arm and shoulder, with birds, a faint musical staff, a small red berry and roots reaching down the arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree with birds and roots on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tree spreads bare branches across the shoulder and upper arm, with small birds and a faint musical staff above it. The trunk narrows into a textured, hollow base that splits into dense roots running down the arm. The work uses black and grey shading with fine hatching, and a single small red fruit sits on the left side of the design.

Botanical Blackwork Upper arm Shoulder Tree Bird Musical staff Root Berry Branches Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You climb the broken stair of Hollin Keep with the cold coming up through your boots, because the steward has said the great hall must be cleared before the thaw, and the ash that grew through its floor in your grandmother's time has to come out. Nobody has managed it. The trunk is too wide for two men, and each time an axe bites, the birds in its crown go quiet and then start again, in tune, as if someone had been humming along.

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You sit down on the flagstones with your back against the hollow base, where the bark has split into a dark knot like a watching eye, and you listen. The notes come down slowly, a little flat, a little careful. Above you a single rowan berry hangs red on a bare twig, the only colour left in the ruin. You think of the lute your father made before the fever took him, the one with a crack in its belly that he never mended, and you press your palm to the trunk and feel it hum.

The next morning you come back with a saw and a block plane, and you take only the fallen limbs, the ones the wind has already stripped. Wood that has been singing for a hundred winters, you tell the steward, makes better instruments than new oak. He laughs, then stops laughing when the birds fly down to the sill of the high window and sit in a row, waiting for you to begin.

By midsummer the hall has a floor of roots you have left alone, and a lute with a soundboard the colour of old honey. When you play the first chord the birds lift together off the branches and scatter like notes, and the roots under the flagstones shift, turning like something stretching in its sleep. You leave the berry where it is.