Black and grey pine tree tattoo on the upper back of a woman seated from behind on green bedding.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pine tree tattoo on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A tall pine tree is tattooed vertically along the centre of the upper back, with a slender trunk and layered, feathery branches drawn in soft grey and black shading. The linework is fine and the tones are gently graded, giving the foliage a textured, slightly painterly look. The photograph is taken from behind in a bedroom, with the subject's head cropped out and the tattoo as the central focus against pale skin and green bedding.

Botanical Back Pine tree Conifer Tree

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 rain has been coming sideways across Hallam Market since six, and the awning over your stall sags with it. You have sold three conifer whips since breakfast, each wrapped in damp newspaper, and the woman who bought the last one told you pines grow slowly and forgive nothing. You nod as if you had not heard that before from your father, who sold the same stock on the same pitch in the same weather.

Keep reading

A boy in a yellow cagoule stops at the trestle and asks whether the tall one at the back is a real tree or just a very thin hedge. You tell him it is a Scots pine, which is about the only thing you are sure of this month. He wants to know how long it takes to reach the height of the church. You tell him longer than anyone standing in the rain will live, and that is why people plant them. He counts coins from a sandwich bag and comes up eleven pence short.

You let him have it anyway. After he has gone, you walk to the back of the stall and stand under the tallest sapling, the one with a single straight leader and branches fanned out in layers like smoke held still. The rain runs off its needles in threads. Your father's ledger is in the drawer under the scales, and the last entry in his square hand reads Pine, one, to be kept for the lad. You have never known which lad he meant.

At closing you take the ledger out, turn to a clean page, and write Pine, one, sold for eleven pence short. Then you wrap the sapling in a sheet of wet newspaper, tuck it under your arm, and walk it up the hill to the bare ridge where nothing stops the wind from doing what it likes.