Upper arm tattoo of a bare tree with a loose blue watercolour-style canopy, black branches and an orange and blue splash at the base.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue watercolour tree on an upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a bare tree with a black trunk and branches, topped by a loose canopy of blue dabs and splatters that fade into pink and purple. Below the trunk, orange tones and a dense dark blue blot form the base, giving a painterly, unfinished edge. The tree is centred on the upper arm and the composition runs vertically down the limb beside a grey vest.

Upper arm Tree Branches Splatter Watercolour

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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 barge is called Marigold Tern, and the canal has frozen at its edges again, so the only way out is to paint. You sit on the cabin roof with a jar of rinse water and a cracked tin of cobalt, waiting for the river to thaw enough to take you to Ely. Your uncle always said a tree on a barge was bad luck, a thing that wanted roots and would sulk without them. You paint one anyway, on the hatch board, starting with the trunk because it is the only part you are sure of.

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The trunk goes up black and thin, forking twice, and then the trouble begins. Blue wants to be wet. You load the brush and let it bloom, dab after dab, until the canopy is a weather of blue that thins to lilac and then to the pink of the sky over the lock at dusk. Where the paint pools you leave it, because your uncle taught you that a river never smooths its own mud. Below the trunk you drop a dark blot, nearly navy, and let it run down into the orange of the towpath leaves, as if the roots had gone into the water and kept going.

By March the frost has gone and the Marigold Tern noses out past the lock gates. Nobody at the boatyard looks twice at the hatch board, but the lock-keeper's girl stops on the bank, squints at the tree and asks whether it is autumn or spring. You tell her it depends which way the boat is facing. She laughs and runs ahead along the path, and you realise you have stopped checking the sky for the next storm.