Black silhouette tree tattoo with purple and teal watercolour washes behind the canopy, sitting on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black tree silhouette with watercolour splashes on the back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a broad tree with a full canopy and spreading branches sits at the centre of the image. Behind and below it, loose purple, teal and green watercolour washes bleed outwards, with drips running down beneath the trunk. The tattoo fills most of the frame against lightly toned skin.

Botanical Back Tree Silhouette Watercolour Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you with the wet boots, and mind the bread crumbs. The oak above Harrowdean has stood since before the church had a roof, and every child in that village knows it has a purple shadow at its roots, even on the brightest day. My gran swore the bruise came from the night the miller's daughter, Ada Penhallow, climbed into its branches to escape her father's debts and came down again with the colour of the dusk on her hands.

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Nobody believed her, of course. Ada went off to the coast with a tinker's cart and a tin of teal paint she'd bought from a traveller who swore it was made from the sea. The village forgot her by harvest. But the oak did not. Every spring after that, the leaves came out black as wet slate, thick as a thundercloud, and the wind would carry a smudge of violet and green down the lane whenever someone was about to tell a lie.

One winter a boy named Tobias Quill tried to cut the tree for firewood. He swung his axe three times, and each blow shook a cloud of colour out of the bark that ran down the trunk in long drips and pooled among the roots. He stopped, went home, and never told anyone what he had seen. He did leave the axe in the mud, though, and when the frost lifted, the blade was rusted into a single bright green leaf.

So when you pass beneath it tonight, keep your hands in your pockets and your promises short. The oak remembers everything it has been painted with.