Colourful swirling tree tattoo with a black trunk and multicoloured flourishes across the upper back, with a small blue bird at the upper left.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful swirl tree on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A tree with a solid black trunk and branches made of black scrolling linework spreads across the upper back. The canopy is filled with loose flourishes and curls in orange, pink, purple, blue, teal, yellow and red, and a small blue bird sits at the upper left. The colour is soft and slightly blended against the pale skin, with the design centred on the shoulder blade area.

Botanical Neo-trad Back Tree Swirl Flourish Bird Scrollwork Leaves

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 seed was kept in a tin the size of a tobacco box, and the mate wanted it over the side before the fog came down on the Tallow Reach. Nobody aboard the Greyling could say why. Maren Oddsdottir had carried it from Skerrow wrapped in a darned stocking, and she would not let him near it.

Keep reading

The old women of Skerrow had told her what it was. It came from a tree that grew on no chart, black in the trunk and curled at every branch, and it would only bloom for someone who had given something away. Maren had given her wedding ring to a widow in Lerwick and her good boots to a boy who had none. The tree, they said, would bring her home.

The fog closed in on the third night. Nobody could see the bowsprit, let alone the rocks. Then a small bird with a blue wing settled on the rail, sang once, and flew off to the left. The captain swore he would not follow a bird, and then he did, because the rigging had gone silent and the sea had gone quiet under the keel. They came out at dawn beneath a headland of black stone, with the tide slack and the gulls calling.

Maren planted the seed in a crack above the high-water mark. By midsummer a trunk had come up, and by autumn its branches had spread into curls in orange, pink, teal and red, each one shaped like a sail coming about. The bird was never seen again. The mate, who had wanted the seed thrown away, now ties a ribbon to the lowest branch each time he sails past.