Black line drawing of a leafy tree with swirling branches and twisted roots, with a small bird above, shown as a design on white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree with swirling branches and roots

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a large tree with a twisted trunk, curling branches and leaves, and spiralling roots spreading below. A small bird in flight sits above the crown. The linework is bold and mostly uniform, with solid black leaves and hatched detail along the trunk and roots, on a plain white background.

Botanical Tree Bird Root Leaves Branches Swirl Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maren had been told that seeds were the only living thing the regulations let through without a form, so when the lorry driver set a bundle of wet sacking on her counter at ten past two, she assumed it was a joke. Unwrapping the hessian took most of a minute. Inside was a sapling no higher than her forearm, its roots bound in a ball of clay gone grey at the edges, and the roots had grown into spirals, curling round one another like rope on a ship's cleat.

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"It came from my mother's yard," he said. "She can't take it where she's going, and I'm not allowed to leave it with her."

She knew the rule. Plant material must be declared, and the inspector from the agriculture office would not be in until morning. So Maren filled in the form in block capitals, ticked the box marked other, and sat with the thing under the strip light while the river moved black beyond the glass. Every so often a root shifted in its clay with a soft dry sound, as if it were still reaching for something.

At first light a wren landed on the sill, hopped along the counter, and then rose to perch on the topmost leaves of the sapling, bobbing there as though it had been invited. Maren watched it for a long time before she stamped the paperwork. Released, she wrote in the box for disposition. In the empty space for destination she wrote the strip of waste ground behind the bus depot, where the council would have to dig around it, and where somebody would have to decide to let it stay.