Grey shaded bare tree tattoo with a small red apple hanging from a branch, sitting on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree with red apple on forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A bare tree with a thick trunk, spreading branches and exposed roots fills the forearm. The tree is drawn in fine black linework with soft grey shading on the trunk and branches. A single small red apple hangs from a branch on the left, providing the only strong colour against the grey, and the design is centred along the arm with bracelets visible on the wrist beside it.

Botanical Forearm Tree Branches Root Apple

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Salt Flat road could say who planted the tree, only that it was there before the road was. Every summer it stood bare, its branches like cracks in a dry plate, and every summer, the drovers said, it carried one apple, red as a lamp, and no more.

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Dunya Corrah drove water to the mining camps for eleven years and never once stopped beside it. Her father had told her the roots went down to a spring under the sand, and that the apple was the spring's way of asking for a visitor. She thought it was the sort of nonsense men offered to pass a hot afternoon. But the year her axle cracked forty miles short of the camp, she sat in the shade of the trunk with a dead engine and nothing but a tin cup, and the apple hung above her head, close enough to touch.

She did not pick it. She dug at the roots with the tyre iron until the sand came up cool, then cooler, and at the depth of her forearm she struck wet clay. Water seeped into the hole, slow and brown. She drank from her cupped hands, then sat back and waited for the relief truck, which came at dusk. When the driver asked how she had lived through the afternoon, she only pointed up at the apple, still hanging there, and said she had been given a choice, and had taken the water instead of the fruit.