Colourful tree tattoo with black outlines and swirling branches across the upper back, below the shoulder blade.

Multicoloured tree tattoo on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A bare upper back shows a tree with thin, twisting branches outlined in black and filled with bands of pink, purple, green, blue, orange and yellow. The trunk base curls into a large green and blue spiral, and the branches sweep out to the left and right. The lines are bold and the colour is vivid and layered, with soft gradients inside the bands.

Back Tree Branches Spiral Swirl Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My father was still scraping indigo from his nails when the dyer from Tyre came up the lane asking to buy the old fig behind our vats. He wanted the wood for a press, he said, and offered three silver rings and a mule. My father laughed and told him the tree had been struck by lightning the year I was born and had grown ever since in whatever direction the vats were boiling. Nobody sold it.

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That night I sat under its branches with a bowl of madder root and watched the lamplight come through. Each limb had taken a different colour from the seasons we had poured over its roots: the pink from spring rainwater, the green from the sorrel we scattered, the blue that ran down the trunk every time my father spilled his pot. The bark had drunk them all. When I pressed my palm to the place where the roots coiled round the base, the wood was still warm from the afternoon.

The Tyrian came back at harvest with a cart and no mule. He stood at the gate for a long time, looking at the branches that swept over the wall like a shawl thrown wide. "I have dyed purple for kings," he said, "and never made a colour that moved." My father did not sell him the tree. He gave him a bowl of madder water and a rag, and the stranger dipped the cloth and held it up against the trunk, and the two colours ran together into one I had no name for.

I still have that rag. It is faded to the grey of old rope, but if you hold it against the spiral in the right light, the colours wake and begin to turn.