Black ink tree with spreading roots on a forearm, with the words Deep roots are not reached by the frost set in bold serif lettering across the trunk and canopy.

Tree with roots and lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tree silhouette fills the upper forearm, with its canopy above and its roots spreading down towards the wrist. The words DEEP ROOTS ARE NOT REACHED BY THE FROST are set in bold black lettering over the trunk and branches, with fine outlines and solid black fills. The design is in black and grey ink and is photographed against a yellow shirt on the left.

Lettering Botanical Forearm Tree Root Lettering Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud Easterby had told the council twice that the ash on the green was dying, and twice they had sent a man with a clipboard who looked up at the crown from the pavement and said it seemed fine to him. She knew better. She had grown up in its shade, had carved her initials into the bark with a hairpin, and had watched those letters stretch and sink as the trunk thickened around them. Nobody who had sat under a tree for seventy years could be fooled by a few green leaves at the top.

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The frost came early that October, white on the bus shelter and the bins before six in the morning. Maud pulled on her late husband's coat, took the spade from the shed and went out in the grey light, past the war memorial and the dog walkers' bags hanging from the railings. The grass crunched. She knelt at the foot of the trunk where the roots broke the soil like the knuckles of a clenched hand, and she began to dig.

The roots went down further than she had expected. They were pale and thick as her wrist, and when she scraped away the top layer the soil beneath was dark and cold but damp, with the faint sweet smell of something still living. She followed one root for an arm's length before it dived beneath the frozen crust of the verge and was lost. Whatever the frost could do to the surface, it could not reach what was held down there.

She filled the hole back in with leaf mould from the bin bags and pressed it flat with her palm. When she stood up, the frost on the green had stopped in a neat brown ring at the edge of the turned earth, and the ash stood in the middle of it, bare and patient, waiting for spring.