Black line tree with layered leaves inside a teardrop outline, with dotwork dots, on the inner forearm of a person wearing a striped top.

Leafy tree in a teardrop on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised tree with a dense canopy of overlapping leaves sits inside a pointed teardrop outline, with roots curling down into a small open circle at the base. A dotted arc and scattered dots frame the upper and lower parts of the design. The tattoo is inked in fine black linework with no shading or colour, and it is centred on the inner forearm against a plain grey background.

Fine line Botanical Dotwork Forearm Tree Leaves Root Teardrop Dot

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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

Mind the stile, it's loose, my father never fixed it and I've never had the heart to fix it for him. Sit down. You'll want to hear how the Harrow orchard came to have one tree that counted its own leaves.

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There was a woman called Ada Corrie who kept the old pear trees on the eastern slope, and she was the sort who wrote everything in a ledger with a pencil worn to a stub. Every autumn she counted the leaves on the one tree that stood apart, the one whose roots ran down into the spring. Four thousand and eleven, one year. Four thousand and eleven the next. She swore it was the same number because the tree had struck a bargain with the water: take what you need, give back in shade.

Then came the dry summer, when the valley went pale and the dust hung over the lane like the dots you see on a map of the stars. Ada went down to the spring with a bucket and found the little round pool nearly gone. She knelt and saw the roots had curled round the stone like fingers round a cup, and she thought, well, there's no help for it. So she carried the tree its water, a bucket a day, and never told her brother.

It rained in October. The leaves came down in a single afternoon, and Ada gathered them up and counted every one into her ledger. The page said four thousand and eleven. Ask me what that means and I'll tell you it means nothing at all, which is the best kind of answer. Go and see for yourself. The spring is still there, round as a plate.