Black and grey tattoo of a bare winter tree beside the navel, with a shaded moon above it, across the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree and moon on torso

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bare tree with fine, branching limbs rises from the lower right of the torso and spreads across the navel area. A shaded moon with mottled texture sits higher on the left side. The linework is dark and detailed, with soft grey shading on the moon and the skin, and the image is in black and white with a dark vignette.

Realism Other Tree Bare tree Branches Moon Torso

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

The frost had lain on the ridge for nine days when Tamsin's grandmother sent her up to the ash with the bone knife. "Cut what you need and not a twig more," the old woman said, drawing her shawl tight against the wind off the moor. "The moon keeps count of every limb taken from that tree."

Keep reading

Tamsin climbed past the broken walls where the ewes had been driven down to the lower fold. The ash stood alone on the crest, every branch bare and fine as a drawn hair, and the moon hung just above it, pale and pocked like a cheese left out too long. She had come for kindling. Instead she stood beneath the trunk and asked it, aloud, why it had kept no leaves for her father when the fever took him in the autumn.

Nothing answered but the wind. Then the bark under her palm gave a faint shudder, and a hollow in the trunk, dark and round as a knot, seemed to open a little wider, as if it had been listening. Tamsin laid the knife down on the frozen grass. She took one thin twig, no thicker than a reed, and closed her hand around the place where her father's name would have been carved if he had been a man who carved things.

She came down with the twig in her fist and the moon at her shoulder. In the morning, when she set it in the hearth, a single bud had broken at its tip, green as a coin. Her grandmother looked at it for a long time and then nodded, as though a sum had finally come out right.