Black botanical tattoo of bare branches with small buds wrapping around a wrist on the forearm, against a dark background.

Bare branches wrapped around a wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bare-skinned wrist and lower forearm carry a tattoo of leafless branches with small buds, wrapping around the wrist in a band. The branches are drawn in solid black ink with tapering, jagged linework and a few shaded edges that give them some depth. The ink is the only colour against the skin tone and the plain black background, which keeps the focus on the design.

Botanical Forearm Branches Twig Bud Wrist band Tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last cart of the season came up the hill road with its wheels wrapped in sacking, and Mother Hesk stood in the yard of the orchard to watch it, because the old pear tree had split in the night and somebody had to say something about it. Her grandson Tobin was already kneeling in the wet grass with a saw, trying to decide where the cut should go. She told him to wait. A split limb did not always mean a dead one. Sap had a way of hiding in the wood until spring, and a branch that looked finished could still be deciding.

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They carried the broken limb into the barn and laid it across two trestles. Hesk ran her thumb along the bark and found the buds she was hoping for, tight and grey as river stones, hardly bigger than the nail of her smallest finger. She had cut the same kind of twig for her own mother the winter the frost took the lower field, and the old woman had tied a length of it around Hesk's wrist and said, that one stays green as long as you keep it near you. Hesk had not believed her then. She tied the new twig around Tobin's wrist now, looping it twice, and he didn't argue, because his hands had gone numb from the cold.

By morning the rain had stopped and the yard smelled of wet iron. Tobin came out with his sleeve still rucked up, the thin black branches standing out against his skin like frost on a window. He held his arm up to the grey light. One bud at the join had swollen overnight, just a shade less dark than the rest, and he laughed out loud at it, the sound going up into the bare orchard like a bird lifting off.