Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two pine trees on the side of a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two simple pine trees, one taller than the other, drawn in dark ink with tapered branches. The linework is clean and thin, and the trees are rendered in solid black with no shading. The skin is pale and softly lit against a dark background, and the tattoo sits in the centre of the frame.

Fine line Other Pine tree Tree Conifer

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The second tree was never supposed to be yours to plant. Your father had left a loop of baler twine on the ground by the gate the evening before, and by the time the frost lifted off the field behind Hollin Lane the twine had gone grey with dew. The spade bit at the third stroke. Beneath the turf the clay was the colour of wet tobacco, and somewhere under it the roots of the old pine at the wood's edge ran out like the spokes of a broken umbrella.

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Mrs Abney from the forestry office had told the parish council that a pine needs a century to forgive being moved, so nobody moved them. The tall one had stood at the top of the common since before the chapel, its branches thinning to tassels near the crown. Yours was a sapling no higher than a tea towel hung on a line, and when you finally set it in the hole you held it upright with one hand while your father tamped the earth with his boot heel and said nothing about the fact that he would not see it grow.

Autumn came with rain blowing sideways over the ridge. You walked up to the common most evenings after school, counting needles on the old tree and checking the young one for browning at the tips. It survived the first frost. It leaned a few degrees towards its neighbour, as if it had decided the tall one knew the way home.

Years later the window of your childhood bedroom still looks out on the two of them from the lane. The taller is black against the sky, the smaller is black against the taller, and when the light comes low over the common they fall across the field together, one shadow carrying the other.