Black ink drawing of a windswept tree with flowing roots on a plain white background, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Windswept tree design on white

Black and grey · Flash

A single tree with a dense, branching canopy rises from a thin, curving trunk that splits into long, sweeping roots at its base. The linework is solid black, with fine, tapered strokes in the branches and bolder, calligraphic curves in the trunk and roots, and there is no shading or grey. The tree sits centred on a plain white background with no other elements.

Tree Branches Root

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tree on the headland above Skerrin Cove had been leaning east since before my father was born, and everyone in the village had an opinion about why. Mrs Abernethy said it was the wind, which was a fool's answer, because the wind had come from the same quarter for as long as anyone kept records. I said it was the roots. You could see them from the coast path when the tide dropped and the cliff crumbled: long pale fingers gripping the rock, sweeping out sideways as if the tree had been trying to walk away from the sea and had got only so far.

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I was the postwoman then, twenty-six years on the round, and I passed it every morning at ten to six in the dark with my satchel strapped tight. In winter the canopy roared. Letters came in soaked, and I learned to keep them inside my coat. One February a storm took the lighthouse lamp for three nights and tore off half the crown. I stood beneath it with salt spitting at my back and thought it looked like a man who had decided, after everything, not to fall over.

When the council wanted it felled for the new path, I wrote to them on the depot's old stationery and asked them to walk the headland first. They sent a young man with a clipboard. He looked at the roots, then at the cliff edge, then at me, and said he had never seen a tree hold so much of its own ground. I told him it had had practice.

Last month I walked the path with a rowan sapling in a bucket, dug from my sister's garden, and planted it on the windward side where the grass is thin. It will lean too, given time. I hope it learns the way the old one did, bending towards whatever keeps it standing.