Close-up of a woman with long blonde hair showing two thin black bands tattooed around her forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two thin bands on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of a woman with long blonde hair, cropped at the nose, with her arm bent and raised. Two solid black bands of differing widths encircle the forearm close to the wrist, with clean, even edges. The image has a soft, warm colour tone, a pale background and a shallow focus on the tattoo.

Blackwork Geometric Forearm Band Line Armband

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The walled garden at Hollin Farm had three pear trees older than the house, and every February my father wrapped their trunks in strips of lead to keep the grubs honest. He called it the tally. Two bands on each tree, one broad and one narrow. The broad one marked a winter the frost had taken, the narrow one a winter we had got through.

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I was nine the year he let me hold the tin snips. The lead came off the roll grey and soft as butter, and he pressed my thumb into the seam so it would sit flat. Wide for what the weather takes, narrow for what you keep, he said. I asked which one the trees minded more. He laughed and said trees never minded anything, which was why they outlived us.

When he died the garden went to seed inside two summers. I came back from the city with a rented van and a bag of secateurs, and the first thing I did was walk the orchard looking for his bands. Most had rusted through. On the third tree, though, the wide one had sunk so far into the bark that the wood had grown over its edges, and the narrow one still sat tight beside it, green with lichen.

I cut the narrow band free and left the wide one where it was. Some things you keep by letting them grow into the wood. I folded the strip into my coat pocket, went back to the van and found the snips under a box of unopened seed packets.