Black and grey tattoo of a leafless tree whose branches spread from the navel across the stomach, with a shaded moon above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree and moon on abdomen

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A leafless tree with fine, branching limbs rises from the navel across the stomach, with its trunk at the lower right of the frame. A softly shaded grey moon sits in the upper left, and small dark freckles or marks are visible on the skin. The image is monochrome, with crisp black linework on the tree and smooth grey tones on the moon against the skin.

Botanical Realism Other Tree Branches Moon

Find an artist for this

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, lad, the kettle's only just gone off and the corridor will keep another ten minutes. You see that elm past the window? It died the winter the boiler failed, and still the night sister won't have it cut down.

Keep reading

My gran told me the moon was a lantern a tree had once swallowed whole, and that every night the tree coughed it back up a little at a time, thin as a fingernail at first, then full enough to read the drug charts by. I believed her until I was nineteen and riding the service lift for Dr Halloran.

One February a woman came up from Ward Seven in a wheelchair and asked to be wheeled to the window facing the elm. She wanted to count the branches before the moon got tangled in them. She counted to three hundred and eleven, then said the tree had grown one more since her husband last came to visit. Nobody argued with her. Nobody ever argues with a woman counting trees at four in the morning.

The elm came down in March. The man who sawed it swore there was a pale ring in the heart of it, round as a coin. I never checked. I just keep the desk lamp on through the small hours, and when the branches on the wall go bare I tell myself the moon is only resting in there until the sap rises.