Two matching black line drawings of a bare tree inside a circle, surrounded by elvish script and a short English quote beneath.

White Tree design with elvish script

Black and grey · Flash

Two identical black and white drawings show a bare, branching tree with small star shapes above it, enclosed in a thick circle. Curling elvish script runs around the circle and in two lines below, with the English line "all that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost" at the foot. The linework is bold and even, with no shading, and the composition is symmetrical and centred.

Tree Circle Star Quote Root

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My grandmother kept the seed in a barley sugar tin, wrapped in oilcloth and tucked into her bodice for the whole road south. She never called it a tree. She called it the promise, which is a long name for something the size of a thumbnail.

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By the time we reached Callow Mill the gatemen had forgotten what the faded banner on the wall was for. They laughed at the tin, then at her, then stopped laughing when she knelt in the frost and dug a hole with a teaspoon. The hill above the town had a ring of grey stones on it, most of them tipped over like skittles, and inside the ring the ground was bare as a plate.

She planted it at the centre on the first night of frost. Nothing came up. The gatemen said so, then the baker said so, then the baker's wife climbed the hill with a lantern to tell her to stop wasting good soil. My grandmother only sat on the fallen stone and watched the sky, where the stars came out in threes, then in fives, then in more than anyone had bothered to count.

In spring a shoot broke through the frost, pale as a candle. It grew straight up, then split into branches that reached for the ring as though someone had described its shape to them. By the next autumn the tin was empty, its lid bent into a dish for salt, and the town had stopped calling the hill cursed and started calling it ours. Now the children climb up to count the stars caught in the branches, and not one of them ever asks where the tin went.