Black and grey tattoo of a treehouse in a bare tree with a ladder, tyre swing and roots, shown on the upper arm.

Treehouse and ladder on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A wooden treehouse sits on a tall trunk with a ladder running up one side, a tyre swing hanging below, and bare branches spreading behind it. The linework is fine and sketchy, with shading in the roof, walls and roots. The tattoo is entirely black and grey and fills the upper arm and shoulder, with the roots spreading across the lower part of the composition.

Upper arm Shoulder Tree Root Branches Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tree had been growing through the chapel floor for longer than anyone in Hawkesmoor could remember. By the time Dilys was nine it had cracked the altar stone in two and pushed its roots out under the nave like grey fingers feeling for water. Her cousin Tom nailed the first boards into its fork the summer the Hensons sold the farm. He said a house in a tree was safer than a house on the ground, because nobody could creep up on you through the roots.

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They built it from pallet wood and the split rafters of the old gatehouse, hauled up one plank at a time on a rope that ran over the broken arch. The ladder climbed the left side of the trunk, its rungs lashed with baler twine. Tom hung a tyre from the lowest bough so it swung out over the dry moat, and they spent whole afternoons turning slowly in it while the castle's empty windows looked on.

The autumn the council came with orange tape, Tom said the tree had to come down before the wall did. Dilys climbed to the hut with a flask of cold tea and a torch and refused to come down. Below her the roots had split the flagstones into a map of small islands, and the sycamore creaked the way old houses do when they are deciding whether to stand.

She sat in the doorway with her knees under her chin and listened to the ladder rattle as someone began to climb, slow and careful, one rung at a time. When the head came through the hatch it was only Tom, mud to the elbows, holding out the coil of rope. 'Bring the tyre,' he said. 'We're taking it with us.'