Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a treehouse with a ladder and trees inside a circle, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treehouse in a circle on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A treehouse with a ladder sits among trees and clouds, enclosed within a large circle. The linework is clean for the outlines and the clouds and circle are built up with stippled dots for shading. The design is in black ink only and is centred on the thigh, with frayed denim shorts visible at the top of the frame.

Dotwork Thigh Tree Cloud Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ladder had eleven rungs, and Nell counted every one of them the summer her father nailed it to the elm. He had never built anything higher than a hen house, so the neighbours came up the lane to watch, shaking their heads at the cedar planks he had hauled up the hill on a borrowed cart.

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Through that August the house grew among the branches like a thought being worked out. Nell carried nails in her apron pocket and handed them up one at a time. When the roof was on, the clouds above it were the only thing in the valley that moved faster than her father's temper, and she swore they were pushing the moon round to get a better look at them.

Years later the elm was still standing when the council sent a letter about rot in the trunk. Nell, grown and sensible, drove up in a van with a saw and a folded tape measure. She stood at the foot of the tree and looked up at the ladder, every rung grey now and loose in its nails. Her father had pulled the bottom two off himself the winter before he died, so that no child could climb without asking first.

She did not climb. She sat on the stump with a flask of tea and watched the light drop through the leaves until the circle of sky went the colour of pencil lead. Then she worked the last rung free by hand and carried it home under her arm, and it was the only thing she ever brought back from that hill.