Black and grey tattoo of a windswept tree breaking into birds, with a script quote below it, across a person's upper back and shoulder blade.

Windswept tree and script quote on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A back view of a person showing a black and grey tattoo of a tree leaning in a strong wind, its branches and foliage dissolving into a flock of small birds. Below the tree, a handwritten script line reads 'we must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy'. The linework is soft and sketchy with grey shading in the foliage, set against plain skin and a dark strap at the bottom of the frame.

Lettering Back Tree Bird Wind Script Quote Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind came off the river at half eleven and found the sycamore on Caldwell Street before it found anyone else. You heard it from the tram shelter, a long pulling sound through the leaves, and you watched the crown lean east as if someone had laid a hand on it and kept pushing. Mrs Okonkwo from the flat above the chemist swore the tree had leaned like that since the council planted it in 1974, but you had never seen it lean this far.

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Your job that winter was to balance the depot ledger at midnight, lock the gate and go home. The easy thing was to do exactly that. The hard thing was the call you had been putting off to the scrap merchant, who wanted the sycamore felled for the new bus lane. He had offered three hundred pounds and his own lorry, and every form on your desk said yes. Tucked under the clipboard was a page from your father's old timetable, and on the back, in his pencil capitals, were the words he used to say whenever you asked him why he never took the shortcut: we must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.

At twenty to one you walked out and stood beneath the tree. A flock lifted from the crown in a ragged smudge and streamed downwind over the car park, dissolving into the dark until you could not tell which specks were birds and which were leaves. The trunk held its lean without snapping. It was not fighting the wind. It had simply agreed to bend the way it was pushed and kept its roots in the kerb.

You tore the form in half, dropped the pieces in the bin by the gate, and rang the merchant from the cab. "Leave it," you said. He laughed and asked if you had been drinking. In the morning the lorry never came, the birds had gone wherever birds go, and the sycamore stood on Caldwell Street leaning east just as it always had.