Darren hadn’t thought of the vagina tree for nearly 20 years, but now, driving back to his hometown with a car full of belongings and a half a fifth of vodka tucked between his legs, the image was burned into his brain like a brand into a horse’s ass.

It was Mikey who found the tree, set apart in a clearing in the woods a quarter mile or so behind his house. He brought Darren there—then just 10 years old—conspiratorially on a cool Friday afternoon after school, and Darren, to say the least, had been disappointed at the initial revelation.

Tin Te. These are the two syllables that had been haunting Damien ever since he began searching for his missing brother, Luke, a year ago; two syllables that are etched in Chinese characters in the corner of the tattoo covering his brother’s back in a Dali-esque vision: an alpine landscape but where the angles seem somehow wrong and the lines waver, where the mundane rock features appear to be leering faces when you look askance and where the colouring subtly changes with his breathing; two syllables that are perhaps the artist’s name, though no-one in any tattoo studio from the St. Pauli strip in Hamburg to the wharves of Shanghai or the Camden Markets of London claims to have heard of him. Or her. He had also tried mainstream art galleries and a university library to no avail. Nor had that bible of the internet, Wikipedia, helped him in this case.