Colour botanical tattoo of a eucalyptus branch with pink flowers and green leaves on a person's back, beside real pink eucalyptus blossom.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eucalyptus branch tattoo with pink blossoms

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of a eucalyptus branch with pink flower buds, gumnuts and long green leaves runs diagonally across the skin. The linework is fine and clean, with soft shading in the leaves and petals. Real pink blossoms and green foliage in the foreground sit beside the tattoo, and the composition is a close, natural-light photograph.

Botanical Back Branch Flower Leaves Blossom

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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 ute had been sitting on the ridge since Tuesday, and Dad's boots were still wet from the creek when I found the tin under the seat. Forty-one envelopes, each labelled in his square capitals: RIVER RED, STRINGYBARK, NORTH FACE. The last one said only PINK, 1987, and it held nothing but a single dry gumnut that rattled in the corner like a dropped tooth.

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Mrs Okonedo at the nursery said the rail trust wanted local stock for the replanting, not some bloke's guesswork. She had a clipboard and no patience. I told her the old man flowered his trees out of season, that he talked to them, that he swore the pink ones only came up where somebody had been grieving. She wrote none of that down. I climbed the blackened slope with a bread bag and secateurs and spent the afternoon under a skeleton of a tree the fire had left standing, its bark peeled back like a cheap paperback.

At the bottom of the gully, where the creek ran brown and quick, there was a single eucalypt in full bloom. Pink brushes, a crowd of them, humming with the first bees since the smoke. I stood in the leaf litter with my hand flat on its trunk and felt foolish. Dad always said you didn't find the seed. The tree handed it to you when it was ready, and you were a fool to reach for it first.

I filled the envelope with what fell into my palm, wrote PINK on the front in my own hand, and left the tin open on the seat so the wind could take the smoke out of it. Mrs Okonedo can have the stock list. I'm keeping the one that flowered.