Circular pastel tattoo of a bare tree with stained-glass style panels in pink, purple and blue, with dotted accents, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pastel tree in a circle on an upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A round tattoo shows a bare tree with branches spreading across panels filled in with pink, lilac, blue and yellow. The outlines are fine and dark, and small dots are scattered around the circle's edge and inside the lower half. The tattoo sits on a pale arm against a patterned print top.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Upper arm Tree Branches Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marjorie,

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The window came down on Tuesday, and I have not stopped thinking about the tree. Mr Pardoe lifted the last panel out of the nave with his gloves on and held it up to the light the way you would hold a letter you did not want to open. It is the round one with the bare oak, the one the Vicar's mother gave in memory of her husband. Pink where the sky should be, lilac in the lower panes, that thin blue like skimmed milk. Nobody in Thornbury ever looked at it properly because the sun was always in their eyes at the Sunday service.

Mr Pardoe says the lead has gone soft and the yellow glass has a crack running from the knot of the trunk down to the rim. He wants to take the whole circle to Bristol. I told him I would carry it there myself on my knee if he would only let me sit with it on the train. He laughed, and then he went quiet, and then he showed me the dots. Tiny points of white paint scratched through the grey, around the edge and in the bottom half where the roots go. His father called them the frost, he said, and the old glazier put them there so the tree would have something to lean on in the dark.

I am writing because I have a confession to make. Before he wrapped the panel in sacking, I asked for a chip of the yellow glass that had already split off, and he gave it to me without a word. It has one of the white dots still on it, no bigger than a pinhead. It fits under my thumbnail, and I have carried it in my coat pocket since Tuesday, the way you carried that stone from the beach when we were girls.

Love, Edie