Black ink pen drawing of a wooden treehouse on a tree trunk, surrounded by cloud shapes and two banners reading out of student loans and treehouse homes, we all would pick the latter.

Treehouse with banner lettering design

Black and grey · Flash

A pen and ink drawing of a wooden treehouse with a small square window, set on a tree trunk and framed by cloud-like shapes. Two ribbon banners cross the image, carrying the lettering out of student loans and treehouse homes, we all would pick the latter. The linework uses dense hatching for the wood grain, bark and shading, with no colour, and the design is centred on the treehouse.

Cloud Banner Lettering

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The letter from the Student Loans Company had been folded into quarters, then eighths, then into a paper aeroplane that nosedived into the compost heap. Dev fished it out with two fingers and smoothed it on his knee. Thirty-one years old, still paying for a geography degree he had never once used to find anything, and the statement said he would be paying until he was fifty-two.

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He built the treehouse in the old ash behind the rented terrace, where the landlord had written in capitals that no structures were to be erected. He used pallets from the Co-op, a door rescued from a skip on Acre Lane and a tin of green paint that was meant for a fence. Mrs Okafor watched from her kitchen window and called out that the council would have something to say about it. Dev called back that the council could have the sky, since nobody was charging him for that.

By October the walls were up and the floor was level enough to hold a flask, a radio and a cushion stolen from his sister's sofa. He sat inside with the hatch open and watched a thunderhead roll over the rooftops, bulging and grey at the edges like something drawn in ink by a patient hand. Rain came down on the slates below and never reached him. The landlord's notice arrived the next morning. Dev read it on the ladder, then turned it over and wrote on the back in pencil: Quit, certainly. Not the tree.