Black fine line willow tree tattoo with drooping branches and roots on the back of a neck, in Botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Willow tree tattoo on the back of the neck

Botanical · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A black willow tree with drooping branches and leafy foliage sits centrally on the back of a neck, with roots spreading downward and curving outward at the base. The linework is fine and the leaves are stippled with small dots, with some soft shading in the trunk and canopy. The design is in black ink only, set against pale skin with a dark area of hair at the top of the frame.

Botanical Fine line Neck Tree Branches Leaves Root

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the rope, Tam, and pass me that ladle. You'll not find a steadier tree on any cut in the county than the willow down at Hobb's Lock. It hangs over the water like a woman who's forgotten to pin her hair up, and it has never once let go of its bank, not in the flood of '47, not when the navvies dug the new channel through the field.

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Ada Pryce kept that lock when her husband Dan went out on the coal boats and never came back up the cut. She pushed a green withy into the mud at the tail gate so she'd have something to look at while she worked the paddles. Every spring it grew longer, its branches bending down to touch the water as though it were reaching for something under the surface. Its roots went down through the clay and wound themselves round the old stone footings until the bank could not slump, however hard the winter rain came.

The winter the council decided the lock was surplus to requirements, the men came with saws and a cart. Ada stood between the trunk and the blades with her lantern held up, and said nothing at all. The foreman, a man called Withers, looked a long while at the roots fanning out under the towpath, curled like fingers gripping a jar lid. He sent his men home for their dinner and never came back. Ada always said a tree that holds the ground does not need to be tall to be stubborn.

So now, when a boat slows down at Hobb's Lock, someone ties a scrap of cloth to a low branch. There must be a dozen rags up there now, faded to the colour of weak tea, and not one of them is mine to take down. Hand me the tiller, love. We're nearly through, and the kettle won't boil itself.