Colour tattoo of a tree showing spring, autumn and winter on an upper arm, with green and pink blossom, orange leaves and snowflakes.

Four seasons tree on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large central tree divides the design into seasons: spring greens and pink blossom on the left, autumn oranges and reds in the upper canopy, and bare, snow-dusted branches on the right. Snowflakes and small white flecks sit against a blue wintry sky at the lower right. Soft, blended shading gives the colour a painterly, watercolour-like finish across the shoulder and upper arm.

Botanical Upper arm Tree Blossom Autumn leaves Snow Snowflake Branches Winter Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The abbot wanted the old pear felled before the Lenten frosts, because it had sulked for three winters and dropped nothing but twigs. I asked for one more spring. Brother Osric had planted it the year the bell cracked, and he had grafted it himself, four limbs from four different trees, though nobody could agree which trees they had been.

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I climbed it with a sack of wax and a knife I had been told not to sharpen. On the east side the blossom was already out, pink and loud against the wall. The south limb was in leaf, the green going yellow at the edges the way Osric's hands did at the end. The north limb had gone bare and grey, and when I pressed my thumb to its bark there was a crust of old snow in the crook, though it had not snowed in the valley since Martinmas.

I cut a scion from the bare limb, the one that had never once produced fruit, and bound it with wax to a stock on the far wall. It seemed a foolish thing to do. The abbot watched from the cloister with his arms folded, certain he was watching a man ruin a tree.

By Candlemas the scion had taken. A single white bud came, then a flurry of blossom on a branch that had been bare for thirty years, and the petals fell onto the snow still lying in the crook of the old limb. Osric had never said why he chose four trees. I think now he wanted the orchard to remember everything at once, and that I should be the one to let it.