Black and grey fine line branch tattoo on the upper arm of a man wearing a white tee printed with bears, owls and deer.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Branch tattoo on upper arm beside animal print tee

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A man's torso and raised arm wear a white short-sleeved tee printed with bears, owls, deer, a wolf and a squirrel, cropped below the neck. A black and grey tattoo of thin, twisting branches with sparse twigs wraps across the upper arm. The linework is delicate with light shading, and the composition is a close crop that centres the arm and shirt.

Botanical Fine line Upper arm Branch Twig Tree Owl Bear Deer Wolf Squirrel

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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

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the embers, because the wood beyond Carrowdale never stayed still long enough to be drawn on a map. Its queen, Ysolde of the Thornhollow, kept a single law carved above her gate: take no branch you cannot carry home. So when the hunters came down from the north with their bows and their bright coin, the foresters only shrugged and let them pass.

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Her steward, a thin man called Piers Varrow, grew tired of all that shrugging. He wanted the great ash at the valley's heart felled for the shipyards, and he promised the creatures of the wood would be moved somewhere kinder by spring. The bear went first, grumbling into its fur. Then the wolf, who had never trusted a promise in its life, and last the owls, who asked only for one more night of hunting. Each departure left the trees a little barer.

On the morning the axes were set against the ash, the old queen walked out in her nightdress with a single twig in her fist. She pressed it into the steward's palm. It was no longer than a finger and bore three buds, one for each creature he had driven out. 'Plant that,' she said, 'and see what grows when nothing is hunted.' Piers laughed, but he dug a hole beside the axe heads and planted it anyway.

By midsummer the twig had thrown out branches that reached across the valley and twined through the ash. The deer came back to browse, the squirrels hid acorns in his boots, and the owls returned to roost in the hollows. Piers never did leave. If you climb the north path tonight you will find him sitting under that tangle of wood, counting the animals that have stopped asking him for anything.