Solid black tree with branches and roots tattooed on the inner wrist, photographed against a purple top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree with roots on inner wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a tree with a full canopy of small leaves and spreading roots, placed on the inner wrist. The linework is bold and simple with flat black fill and no shading. The ink sits against pale skin, with a hand resting palm up and red nail polish in the foreground and a purple fabric behind.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The council wanted the ash down before the frost, but Mrs Okafor's son paid me in cash to leave the roots where they were, which is how I came to be kneeling in her side return with a mattock at half past six on a Tuesday in November. The trunk had been cut to a stool years before. What remained was a black knot of root running under the flagstones, thick as my forearm where it left the clay and thinning to hair-fine threads that found the drain and the gap under the back gate.

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I dug around it for three days. Every time I thought I had reached the end of a root, it carried on sideways under the wall toward the neighbour's bay tree. My father used to say a tree is mostly the part you never see, and I nodded the way you do at fathers. By Thursday my palms were blistered and the light was going by four. I was scraping soil from a fork where two roots split when a sprout pushed through the cut, a single leaf the colour of wet slate, so new it still had the folds in it.

Mrs Okafor came out with two mugs of tea and stood looking at it for a long time. She didn't ask me to pull it out. She said the tree had held that wall up for sixty years and could go on doing it without a crown. I put the mattock in the van and drove home with soil under every nail, the leaf still pale in my head, and the roots going on in the dark.

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