Black and grey realism style tattoo of a bare tree with birds, its trunk merging into an acoustic guitar, on an upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree and acoustic guitar on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a bare tree with branches and birds spreads across the upper arm and shoulder. Its trunk runs down into an acoustic guitar at the lower part of the design, with the guitar body shaded to look like it is growing from the roots. Soft grey shading gives the tree and guitar depth against the warm skin tone, and the photo is framed closely on the arm.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Tree Guitar Bird Branches Root

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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

Sit down, sit down, the cart's not going anywhere till the rain stops, and you'll hear the rest before the lamps are lit. Our Dessie carved his first guitar from the elm that stood dead behind the big top at Stowey Green, the summer the rides came up from Lincoln and never went back. The farmer wanted it felled for firewood. Dessie offered him a week of his wages instead, and sat down under those bare branches with a penknife and a bottle of cider.

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Every night after the last waltzer shut down, he'd play to that tree. Nobody could say what he played, only that the crows came down to the lower limbs and sat there like notes on a stave, and the ground under the roots went soft as a cushion. By September the rooks had nested in the crown, and the fair's old fortune teller swore she'd seen the trunk lean towards the stage when the tune turned sad.

When the carving was done, the body came from the root ball, dirt still caught in the grain, and the neck came from the trunk where the sap had run out like tears. Dessie strung it with gut and took it on the road with him, never sold it, never let it out of his sight. Wherever he played after that, a sapling came up through the car park by morning, bare as bone, with birds already waiting in it.

So if you're sleeping rough tonight, put your ear to the grass by the dodgem pen. Hear that? Somebody's still tuning, and the birds are going up off the wire one at a time.