Colour tattoo of a gnarled tree with bright orange and red foliage and grassy roots covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Autumn tree on upper arm and shoulder

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo of a gnarled tree with a thick, twisting trunk and bare branches spreading into a canopy of orange and red foliage. The trunk is shaded in grey and ochre with visible bark texture, and grass at the base fades into green and yellow. The tree covers the upper arm and shoulder, with the canopy extending across the top of the shoulder and the roots running down the outer arm.

Traditional Upper arm Shoulder Tree Autumn leaves Branches Grass Bark

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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

Dear Maggie, I'm writing this on the back of a drug chart because the staff room biro has died and the night sister has the only good pen. Outside the east window of Ward 9 the old oak is doing its autumn thing, rust and fire at the top, while its trunk looks like it has been wrung out and hung up to dry. The porters say the surveyors wanted it felled in 1962 to make room for the new car park, and the matron stood at its foot with a clipboard and refused to move.

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Mrs Hollis in bed four asked me to raise her blind at half past three so she could see it. She is ninety-one and has watched that tree from the same pillow for most of her life. She told me it lost its crown in the great gale of '87, when half the county's chimneys came down, and it spent the next twenty years growing sideways like a man leaning into rain. I asked her if it was dying. She laughed until the cough caught her and said no, it's only showing off before the frost gets it.

I'm enclosing a leaf I picked up from the grass at the base, though the damp has pressed it the colour of stewed tea. Tell the children I said hello and that the lift on the north side is still broken, so the bloke from maintenance has taken to carrying the trolleys up the stairs with a grin. Ten more hours to go. The kettle in the sluice has just clicked, and I can hear the tree knocking softly against the glass as the wind gets up.

Love, Dan