Stone is where families carve what they most want kept. This studio carves a tree and deliberately leaves every name off it.
Relief without inscription. The plaque on the desk is carved in low relief: a stem, dividing boughs, finer branches — the silhouette of ancestry. It is not an inscription, because inscriptions name people, and the people of this studio are fictional. A named carving would be a monument to someone who never lived; a bare tree is a monument to the idea of descent itself.
Carvers will tell you relief is the honest form: it can only show shapes, never claims. That honesty is the desk’s rule in every material — the chart in ink lines, the portraits in light, the plaque in stone — shapes everywhere, documents nowhere.
Briefing carved stone. Say ‘abstract branching lines in low relief, no letters, no names, no dates, no symbols’. Generators asked for a ‘carved plaque’ reach instinctively for rune-like marks; the negative list is what stops them. Inspect the render enlarged: any cut that resolves into a character is a cull.
Keep the plaque leaning or lying at the desk’s side, smaller than the book. It is the heaviest object in the room and should feel settled, not displayed.