Dark-outlined tree tattoo with green leaves and red and green lettering reading Money, the root of all evil, on a person's upper back.

Tree with money lettering on upper back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a tree with a twisted, spiralling trunk and branches, with exposed roots spreading at the base. Black linework outlines the tree and shading in the roots, and the leaves are filled with flat green ink. The words Money, the root of all evil run across the top and bottom in hand-drawn lettering, in green and red, framing the tree on the skin of the upper back.

Lettering Botanical Back Tree Root Leaves Lettering Money Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You inherit the walled garden at Hollin Farm from an aunt who never once let you pick a plum. By the time the frost has left the brickwork, you have learned that the old tree behind the greenhouse is not a pear tree at all. Its leaves are the green of pressed notes, and in a breeze they make the dry, papery sound of a till drawer closing. Mrs Achterberg, who sells eggs from a crate at the gate, tells you a steward planted it a hundred years ago so that his name would stay on the land after him.

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You tend it anyway. You prune the spiralling trunk where it has wound itself around the well cover, and you dig out roots that have pushed under the fence into the bean beds. Every autumn a few leaves come loose and you gather them up. Some are damp and smell of the bank. You cannot bring yourself to put them on the compost, so they go on the kitchen windowsill, where they curl a little more each week. Below the cold clay, where the roots are thickest, you notice shapes pressed into the soil, figures with one arm lifted, as if they had been reaching for the light for a long time.

In March you dig down to see where the largest root goes and find a tin box rusted shut, packed with coins that have lost their faces. Folded inside is a note in a careful hand: Cut it down and the roots will still be here. You read it twice, then put the box back exactly where it lay.

That spring you plant runner beans in the gap the box left behind. They climb the trunk, twining round the branches, and by midsummer the leaves nearest the beans have softened to a plain green that holds no ink at all.