Abstract black linework branch tattoo with pink and blue watercolour washes running down a forearm towards the wrist.

Abstract black branch with watercolour wash on forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of a thorny, branch-like abstract form in black ink runs from the upper forearm down towards the wrist. The bold, tapering linework is interspersed with soft pink and pale blue watercolour washes that fade into the skin. The design is asymmetrical, with the strongest lines at the top and bottom and the wash concentrated in the middle of the composition.

Forearm Branch Thorn Abstract Watercolour Vine

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thornbush at the edge of Hobb's Field had grown so fast that spring that nobody in Ashcombe could remember it being a bush at all. Mara Quill came out with the shears before the frost had lifted, meaning to cut it back for the lambing pens, and found the branches had already crossed the stile and reached the lane. Every twig was tipped with a hook as fine as a fishbone. Where the sap ran, the wood went the colour of a bruised plum, then pale blue as the sun climbed over the hedge.

Keep reading

Her grandmother had told her that a thorn tree only grew where someone had made a promise and broken it. Mara had laughed at that when she was nine. She did not laugh now, kneeling in the wet grass with a torn sleeve and a scratch rising red across her wrist. She thought of her brother Tam, who had sworn on the church bell rope that he would come back from the coast by midsummer, and who had not written since Candlemas.

She worked through the morning, cutting and tying, until the bush was low enough to step over. At noon she carried the last cut branch to the pen and laid it across the gate. Its tip caught on the wood and held, a single black barb pointing up the lane towards the coast road.

By evening the pale blue had spread along the gatepost. Mara left the gate shut and went in to bank the fire, and when she looked out again the barb was pointing at the road no longer, but at her door.