Black fine line tattoo of a bare tree with exposed roots on the inner forearm, shown against denim and a brick wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree with roots on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bare tree with thin, branching limbs rises from a root system at the base of the design. The linework is fine and even, with the branches tapering to delicate points and the roots spreading out at the bottom. The tattoo is in black ink with soft grey shading, set centrally on a pale forearm against a blue denim background.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Tree Branches Root

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 ash at the crossroads had been dead since the spring the surveyors pegged the road, and by the time my master sent me out with the saw its limbs were grey as old rope. Nobody in Venta would walk beneath them after dark.

Keep reading

I climbed the trunk with a rope round my waist and counted the branches the way my mother counted stitches, one thin reach at a time, each tapering to a point no thicker than a hair. The bark had gone. Beneath the crown I could see where the roots fanned out into the cold clay, pale and forking like a river seen from a hill, and I could not understand how a thing so bare still fed anything.

Master Cerdo had no patience for my questions. He wanted the wood for the kiln. I told him the roots were holding the bank above the spring, and he laughed and said a ditch could hold itself. So I left the saw in its case and went down to the water with a spade, digging until my palms bled and the roots came up white and wet in my fists.

That winter I planted what I had dug in the yard behind the bakehouse. In spring a single green leaf came up from the root I had carried home, and Cerdo stopped laughing long enough to ask what I had done. I told him nothing. The old ash stood on at the crossroads with its arms raised, and every morning I walked past it and counted the buds that were not there yet.