Upper arm tattoo of a gnarled tree with twisting roots and branches, shaded in grey with pink-tipped leaves.

Gnarled tree on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large tree with twisted trunk, knotted branches and sprawling roots covers the upper arm and reaches toward the shoulder. The linework is dark and detailed, with grey shading giving the bark and trunk depth, and small leaves picked out in pink. The tree is shown against plain skin, with the arm cropped at the top and a dark patterned top visible behind it.

Upper arm Tree Root Branches Leaves

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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 lamp. Nobody in Hollin Bank will tell you where the old ash came from, but I'll tell you, because my nan told me, and she had it from a man who went down the Deep Pit the year the owners sealed the north gallery.

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The tree stood at the top of the spoil heap, where nothing else would take root. It was gnarled even then, its trunk twisted like wrung cloth, and it had been there before the first shaft was sunk. Its roots went down as far as the coal. Every miner knew the old rule: when the leaves came up pink in spring, the seam would hold. When they went grey, you walked out and didn't look back.

Then there was Tom Garrow, young and clever, who didn't believe a word of it. He took a pick and a candle to the root line below the engine house, meaning to prove the tree was just a tree. He found the roots threaded through the rock like veins, and every one of them was warm to the touch.

He came up at dawn with his hands full of leaves, pink as a cut lip. The shift boss never asked where he'd been. That summer Tom planted those leaves himself along the heap's edge, and the tree is still standing there, watching over the pit it feeds.