Traditional style tattoo of an eye shedding teardrops above a tree with leaves, red berries and roots on an upper arm.

Eye and tree with roots on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A colourful eye with a rainbow iris and long lashes sits above a stylised tree with teal and green leaves, red berries and spiralling curls. Teardrops fall from beneath the eye into the branches, and the roots spread across the bottom of the design. Bold black outlines and soft shading sit alongside solid colour fills in green, teal, yellow, red and blue.

Traditional Upper arm Eye Tree Root Teardrop Leaves Berry Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, the fire only lasts as long as the telling and I've been talking since Vespers. Brother Tobiah had charge of the walnut in the cloister garden, a tree so old its roots had lifted the flagstones of the chapter house. Every morning he carried his bucket out past the painted eye above the garden gate, the one the abbot had set there so the village would know God was watching the grounds.

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The tree had leaves like green and teal spearheads, some edged in gold as if the autumn had got into them early, and red berries the blackbirds would not touch. Tobiah noticed it wept at dusk. Drops fell from the branches one after another, blue as river ice, and where they struck the earth the grass came up greener by morning. He took his worry to the abbot, who only said the eye above the gate wept for the valley's sins and the tree drank what the eye shed, and that was the end of it.

But the spirals on the branches kept tightening, and one night Tobiah dug down beside the roots with his own hands. They ran under the orchard, under the mill race, under every well in the parish, and every root was wet. A miller's girl came to the wall that week with an empty jar, asking whether the tree could give back what it had taken from her brother in the spring. Tobiah had no answer, so he sat under the walnut until the bell rang, letting the cold drops fall on his hood.

In the morning the girl's brother walked up the lane, shaking the rain from his coat. Tobiah never said whether the tree had given him back or whether he had simply come home by his own feet. Mind the roots on your way out. They are still there, and so is he.