Black ink bare tree tattoo with spreading branches, roots and small floating leaves on a forearm, in a botanical style.

Bare tree tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single bare tree with a thick trunk, spreading branches and fine roots is tattooed on the forearm, with small leaves or seeds drifting above the crown. The tree is drawn in solid black ink with crisp, tapering lines and no shading, so the silhouette stands out against the pale skin. The plain white background and the person's black clothing and gold studded belt keep the focus on the tattoo.

Botanical Forearm Tree Branches Root Leaves Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Haskett found the seed in the bread locker on the eleventh week out of Bristol, wrapped in a scrap of tarred sailcloth and wedged between two biscuits gone soft with damp. It was no bigger than a thumbnail and dark as a burnt crust. Captain Oram wanted it over the side before the watch changed. Ruth Penhale, who had signed on as a boy and was found out only when her hammock sagged in the wrong place, asked for a tin cup and a handful of wet sand, and got both before anyone could argue.

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The seed split in the dark of the hold. By the Cape it had a pale stalk the length of a finger, and the men stopped swearing at the cup when they passed it. Each sailor gave a little of his water ration at the end of the day, and nobody wrote it in the log. When the stalk forked, Haskett said it was a bad omen, then brought it a sliver of his own pipe-cleaner twig to lean on anyway.

They raised the island of Scarrow in a grey dawn, its headland bare except for wind-scoured rock. Oram ordered the landing boat readied and told Ruth to bring the cup along, because a cup is worth something in port. She climbed the headland instead, dug into the thin soil with her knife, and set the seedling down with its roots spread like fingers. The men tied it to three stones against the gale. "A thing should be able to see where it came from," she said, and nobody laughed.

Years later the bay was crowded with fishing boats, and the headland was a crown of black branches. Each autumn the wind lifted small winged seeds off the crown and carried them out over the water, toward the ships coming in, so that every captain who set foot on Scarrow went home with a pocket full of its seeds and a story about a girl with a cup of sand.