Tree with roots design
Botanical · Mixed · Flash
A single tree stands upright with a thick trunk, branches spreading into a full canopy of dark leaves, and a few leaves picked out in muted red. Its roots fan out beneath it in fine, detailed lines. The drawing uses dark linework and soft grey shading on a plain white background, with the tree centred and the roots giving it a balanced base.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Old Maud Pennock had kept the orchard below Harrowgate keep for forty years, and she never once let anyone cut the ash that grew out of the south wall. The masons wanted it down. The lord's steward wanted the stones for a new byre. Maud only shook her head and pointed at the roots, which had split the mortar of the great hall and lifted the flagstones like loose teeth.
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"It was planted by the last lady," she told the steward's boy, who had come with an axe and a face full of impatience. "She buried a ring under it the night the castle fell, and told the tree to keep what the men took."
The boy laughed, but he did not swing the axe. Instead he sat on a broken step and watched the wind turn the leaves, most of them dark as iron, a few the colour of old wine. Maud brought him bread and cheese and let him wait out the afternoon.
At dusk the boy dug with his bare hands where the roots ran thickest and found nothing but cold clay and a single rusted nail. He came back to the wall, tired and mud-streaked, and told Maud so. She only smiled and said the tree had never promised him a ring. It had promised to hold the wall up while he slept, and it had.
The boy went home by the river road, and the ash stood on in the ruins, its roots reaching under every stone that had ever fallen.
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