Black and grey realism tattoo of a bare tree with twisting roots running from the side ribs down towards the hip.

Tree with exposed roots on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a bare tree with a gnarled trunk, spreading branches and small leaves near the tips, running vertically along the side of the torso. The roots fan out at the bottom towards the hip, and the bark and branches are rendered with fine linework and soft grey shading. The photograph is black and white and frames the design closely against the curve of the body.

Botanical Realism Ribs Tree Branches Root Leaves Bark Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ash at Scarrow Lock had stood bare for three winters, and the bargemen swore it was walking. Mab Turley, who kept the lock gates and had no patience for bargemen, said it was only cold in the roots. Then one February she found the mud at its base combed open like wet hair, and the roots lying out across the towpath in long grey loops.

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"You took my leaves," the tree said. The voice came up through the wet boards of the sluice rather than from any branch. "A man from the Cutting carried them off in a sack last autumn, to dry for his pipe and to stuff his wife's mattress." Mab remembered him, a stooped man with a bad hip, and the sack that had dripped green all the way to Mill Road. "I cannot go looking," the ash said. "My feet are in the clay."

Mab did not argue. She took a lantern up the Cutting road, knocked on the stooped man's door and asked him plainly for the leaves back. He wept at the kitchen table and fetched them down from the rafters in a flour bag, brittle and smelling of tobacco. She carried them back to the lock and scattered them across the roots one handful at a time, the way her mother had scattered seed.

In April the ash put out a single green leaf on its highest bough, the first anyone had seen in three years, and the roots drew back into the mud like a hand closing. Mab hung her father's oilskin on the lowest branch, where it stayed, stiff and salt-stained, until the bargemen stopped calling the tree a walker and started calling it hers.