Small watercolour-style tattoo of a bare black branch over a blue and pink wash, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare branch with watercolour wash on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small bare branch with fine black linework sits over a soft wash of blue and pink ink on the inner forearm, close to the wrist. The branch has thin, tapering twigs with a few darker strokes, while the colour fades out at its edges like watercolour paint. The composition is centred on the forearm, with a partly visible person standing on a light wooden floor in the background.

Botanical Forearm Branch Twig Watercolour wash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been up the heap since the hooter, picking her way over grey shale to where the old hawthorn grew out of the tip, bent sideways by the wind off the coking ovens. Nobody else bothered with it. Its leaves had gone in October and it stood there with nothing but black twigs, but she knew the bark was still green underneath, because her father had told her so when she was small.

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She snapped a single branch, as long as her forearm, and wrapped it in her headscarf. Walking down past the chapel and the washing lines, she thought about the colours that came over the terraces before the shift buses ran: blue from the cold sky, and pink where the sun caught the steam rising from the baths. Her brother Tom was on days at Harcourt Drift, and he had said that morning the cage was running slow.

At home she stood the branch in the stone jar on the windowsill, where the light came in grey. She filled the jar from the kettle and waited. Tom came in at six with coal dust in the creases of his neck, saw the twigs and stopped.

'It's dead,' he said. 'Dead's dead.' She didn't answer. She pulled the blind up, and the first light came over the tip, blue and then pink, spilling across the branch and the whitewashed wall behind it, so that for a minute the bare wood seemed to be standing in the sky. Tom sat down at the table and didn't take his boots off.