Colour tattoo of a bare sapling with a red bauble, standing on blue and brown planks, in a neo-traditional style on the upper arm, with a robot tattoo below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare sapling with red bauble on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A small tattoo shows a thin, leafless sapling growing from a blue mound on two brown wooden planks, with a shiny red bauble hanging from one branch. The bold outlines and flat fills give it a cartoon-like look, with simple highlights on the bauble. The small design sits in the centre of the frame on pale skin, with a larger robot tattoo in blue and grey partly visible at the lower right.

Neo-trad Upper arm Tree Robot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Four in the morning and the flour was already in my hair. Dev had left the back door propped with a brick the way he always did, so the cold came in off the yard and curled around the proving drawers. I was on my third tray of cinnamon knots when I heard three soft taps on the glass. Nobody knocked at that hour. Nobody but Mr Pellow, and Mr Pellow had been dead since March.

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I wiped my hands and went to look. A boy stood on the step with a sapling wrapped in a blue dust sheet, its roots tied to two old scaffold planks. It was bare as a coat hanger, every twig black against the streetlight. Hanging from the highest branch was one red glass bauble, dented, catching the light like a boiled sweet. 'Dad said you'd know where it goes,' he said. 'He said you'd know the bauble.'

I did know. Pellow had planted it in the square the year the bakery opened, a cheap thing from the garden centre, and every December he hung his late wife's bauble on it and swore it would fruit. It never fruited. Then the council took the square for a bus shelter, and somebody's dog chewed through the tape. I had not thought about it in years.

I unhooked the bauble and held it in my palm. The boy kept looking past me at the bread. 'Two cinnamon knots,' I said, 'and you can keep the tree until it's warm enough to plant.' The sky went grey over the rooftops while he ate. By the time the first van pulled up, the bauble was back on the highest twig, turning slowly in the draught from the door.