Black ink line drawing of a tree with swirling roots and a green watercolour-tinted canopy of leaves, drawn on paper as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree with roots line drawing

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A tree with a twisting trunk, spiral patterns and long branches spreads into a canopy of heart-shaped leaves, with its roots spread out below. The linework is black ink with hatched and swirled detail on the trunk and roots, and the leaves are lightly filled in green. The drawing sits centred on a plain off-white sheet of paper.

Botanical Tree Root Leaves Branches Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stationmaster at Hollin Cross had the saw ready and the order signed, but the old woman from the level crossing came up the platform with a spade over her shoulder and would not be moved. "You cut that lime and the line goes with it," she said. "Ask your signal box. It's been running on those roots for ninety years."

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Nobody believed her until the foreman dug by the buffer stop and found the roots going down in tight spirals, banded with hatching like the grain of old rope, and threading under the sleepers as far as the water tower. The tree had been planted the year the line was laid, by a porter called Edwin Marsh, who buried his wife's wedding ring at the base of the sapling so that she would always have somewhere to come back to. Most of the tales told at Hollin Cross are lies, but nobody had ever found a reason to doubt that one.

Every train that came in shook the roots a little, and the tree answered by pushing its heart-shaped leaves out over the platform roof, so the drivers slowed without knowing why. In the hard winter the rails iced over and the tree held the frost on its branches like lace, and no train left the line between the two bridges. The old woman said the roots carried the shaking down into the dark earth, where it could not reach the carriages.

The company sent an engineer with a theodolite and a new plan, and he was given a cup of tea and a bench under the branches while he thought about it. By the time the tea was cold he had drawn the new track a yard to the left, curving around the spiral of the roots, and signed his name at the bottom. The lime still stands. Each spring a single green leaf drops onto the timetable board, and the stationmaster sweeps it up and pins the timetable back over it.