Fine line black tree tattoo with spreading bare branches on the inner wrist, beside a beaded bracelet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a bare tree with thin, spreading branches sits on the inner wrist, with the trunk entering from the right edge. The linework is delicate and mostly uniform, with a darker solid base at the trunk. The tattoo is in black ink against pale skin, with a beaded bracelet and a grey knitted sleeve and a floral fabric in the background.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Tree Branches Bare tree Wrist Bracelet

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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 nearer, the fire's only good for another hour, and you'll want the rest of it before the lamp goes out. Folk say the Halloran Brothers' Circus folded in the wet of '38, but that's the sawdust talking. It folded in the spring, when the elm behind the winter quarters went bare overnight, just as Mabel Quill said it would.

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Mabel kept the ledger and the one good kettle. She'd watched that elm leaf every April for thirty years and it had never once refused. That morning its branches stood out against the grey like the veins on the back of an old man's hand, every twig thin and black, the trunk knotted and dark at the base where the roots had gone sour in the ground.

Teodor, the clown, climbed it anyway. He had a notion the tree was holding the big top up from underneath, which is nonsense, and he said so, and then he went up with a coil of rope and a tin of soot to blacken the knots. Halfway up he laughed and called down that the branches were a map of every town they'd played. Each fork was a road, each twig a night under canvas.

They packed the wagons that week and left the elm standing in the frost, its limbs scratching at the sky. Teodor took one twig home in his cap. Years after, when the last of them had scattered to the coast, a woman came knocking to ask after the tree, and the twig was still in his cap, sharp as the day he'd picked it. Some things don't go bare for good. Now, bed, before the coals go grey.