A bare black-lined tree with pink, red and yellow watercolour-style washes across the ribs, shown in colour and in greyscale side by side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree with watercolour wash on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

Two photographs of the same tattoo on the side of a torso, one in colour and one in greyscale. A bare tree with a dark trunk and spreading branches runs up the ribs, with soft pink, red and yellow washes behind the branches and orange tones low on the trunk. The crisp black linework of the branches contrasts with the loose, bleeding colour fields.

Ribs Tree Trunk Watercolour wash Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tree on Tollmarsh Hill had lost its leaves in October and most of its nerve by Christmas, and Mrs Ada Penhale would not let the council have it. She came up each evening with a biscuit tin of pigments and a jam jar of rainwater, and she painted the sky behind the branches before the lamps came on along the ring road. The black wood stayed where it was, she said. It was only the evening that needed help staying in one piece.

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Tomas Reeve, who delivered paraffin to the cottages, watched her from the gate for three weeks before he asked why a dead tree needed colour. She said it didn't. The colour was for the sky, which had nowhere to go once the sun had left it, so it bled out past the edges of the branches into the grass, and nobody had ever told it to stop. She let a yellow wash sink low into the trunk, where the cold came up out of the ground, and told him to hold the jar steady.

On the Thursday the council men arrived with a saw and a van. Ada was already there, kneeling in the wet grass, working an orange into the bark until it looked like the ring road lamps had soaked into the wood. The foreman looked up at the branches, black as a line drawn with a steady hand against the red sky, then at Tomas, and asked who had been painting it. Tomas said nothing. The foreman lowered the saw and walked back to the van.

In April the buds came, and they were exactly the pink of her tin, though nobody had painted them.