Black and grey botanical tattoo of a large weeping willow tree across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Weeping willow tree across upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large weeping willow tree covers the upper back, with its trunk set to the left of centre and drooping branches spreading over the shoulder blade. The design uses fine linework and dense dark marks for the foliage, with grey shading giving the canopy depth. The image is black and grey against a plain grey backdrop, with soft lighting on the skin.

Botanical Back Tree Branches Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Maud Tallow rose before the rooster every morning to light the oven at the bakehouse behind the mill, and every morning the willow at the bottom of the lane was already awake, leaning over the millrace with its hair in the water. The village said it had been planted by a girl who drowned herself for a miller's son who never came back from the wars. Maud did not believe it. She believed the tree was simply thirsty, and that bread needed water as much as anything.

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One February the flour ran short. The mill was frozen and the carts could not get over the ford, so Maud went down at four in the dark with a bucket and a lantern to fetch millrace water for the dough. The willow was bent so low its branches brushed her shoulders, and in the lantern light she saw that every leaf had a small pale mark on its underside, like a thumbprint pressed into dough. She counted them until the lantern guttered. Then she counted again, because counting was what her mother had taught her to do when she was frightened.

She came back up the lane with the bucket slopping and found the bakehouse door open. Inside, a boy she had never seen was kneading, his sleeves rolled, his hands white to the wrist. He did not look up. He said the flour was in the bin and the oven was hot, and that she should go and sit down because she had been out too long. Maud sat. When the first loaves came out brown and split at the top, she looked round and the boy had gone, the water in the bucket was still warm, and on the bench beside her lay a single willow leaf, dusted with flour.