Full arm sleeve tattoo of oak leaves and tree bark in colour, running from the upper arm down to the wrist.

Oak leaves and bark arm sleeve

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full arm sleeve shows gnarled tree bark and bold oak leaves in green, orange and yellow. The bark is rendered with dark, heavy outlines and soft shading, with teal and grey tones in the gaps between the wood. The leaves overlap the upper arm and forearm, and the image is a clean studio shot against a plain white background.

Neo-trad Botanical Upper arm Forearm Wood Leaves Sleeve

Find an artist for this

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

The king's men had given the oak of Harrowdale three winters to die, and by the third they had stopped coming to measure it. Mab Corran did not wait for them. She went up the trunk in the grey hour before frost, a knife in her teeth, and cut the ivy from the fork where the old wood split like the knuckles of a hand.

Keep reading

Inside the furrows of bark ran a thread of teal water, cold under her palm. She had been told as a child that the tree remembered every acorn it had ever dropped, and that if you pressed your ear to the grain you could hear them turning over in the dark like coins in a purse. She heard nothing but her own breath and, far down, the slow creak of the trunk leaning toward the sea.

Those who came to take the oak's wood for the king's new hall found it harder than they expected. Their saws skipped off the grain. Their axes came back with leaves caught in the blades, green, then bronze, then gold, as though the tree were shedding a whole year in an afternoon. The foreman swore it was a trick of the light. Mab only tied a black cord around her wrist, the way her grandmother had, and told him the wood was not for sale until someone asked it properly.

When the king rode out in spring, the oak was in full leaf, a green so loud it hurt the eyes. He asked her what she wanted. She said the hall should be built from fallen limbs and not the living trunk, and that the tree would decide which limbs had fallen. The king laughed until he saw the storm-blown branch lying across his own road, split clean and already sprouting.