Traditional style tattoo of a sharpened wooden stake with the script words Mr. Pointy and red blood drops on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wooden stake with blood drops

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A sharpened wooden stake with visible wood grain runs diagonally across the skin, with the script words Mr. Pointy written beside it in black. Three red drops or splashes sit below the pointed end. The stake has brown shading and black outlines, with flat fills and bold linework typical of a traditional design.

Traditional Upper arm Wood Blood Drop Script text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fence post had split again by the time Nell reached the bottom row, so she fetched the stake from the shed instead. Her grandfather had cut it from a length of ash the winter before, shaved to a point fine enough to thread a needle, and the day he finished it he painted two words down its flank in his careful schoolmaster hand. Mr. Pointy. Nobody in the family could say why. He had looked at it, decided it had a character, and that was the end of the discussion.

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The old Bramley at the end of the row had been leaning since June, its limbs heavy with fruit that wanted to touch the grass. Nell drove the stake into the soft earth beside the trunk with the heel of her boot, one clean knock after another, and the ground gave it up easily. A bramble had caught the back of her hand that morning, and three small beads of blood had dried on her knuckles, bright as wild cherries. She wiped them on her jeans and kept going, because the windfalls were already splitting on the grass and the wasps had found them.

Her grandfather came down the path with two mugs of tea and stood a while looking at the tree, not at her. "You put it on the windward side," he said. "Good. It isn't holding the weight, mind. It's only telling the tree which way to lean." He handed her a mug and didn't say anything else about it.

By dusk the Bramley had straightened a little, held up by the twine she had looped round its trunk and tied to the ash. She left the stake where it stood, its painted name facing the house, so her grandfather would see it first when he went out in the morning to count the apples.