Black linework tree with bare branches and carved orange jack-o'-lantern pumpkins with green leaves, tattooed across an upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pumpkin tree on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A bare black tree with twisting branches and exposed roots spreads across the upper arm and onto the shoulder. Several orange jack-o'-lantern pumpkins with carved faces hang from the branches, with small green leaves scattered through the design. The bold black outlines contrast with the flat orange and green fills against the skin, and a plaid sleeveless top and a street setting are visible behind.

Upper arm Tree Pumpkin Jack-o-lantern Branches Root Leaves Halloween

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bread had been forgotten again, and Nell Harrow stood at the orchard gate with flour still on her wrists, watching the wind shake the last green leaves off the black tree. Its branches reached over the wall and across the lane like the fingers of a hand that wanted something. Every year the tree asked for the same thing on the same night, and every year she gave it the bread first.

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Her son Tomas came up from the roots with the lanterns in a wicker basket, nine of them, their orange skins cold and damp from the cellar. The roots had broken through the churchyard wall decades back and now coiled under the lane like sleeping eels. He set the basket down and tipped his cap at the gate. 'Which one is yours, Mam?' he asked, and she pointed to the lowest bough, where a fruit hung with a crooked mouth and one eye cut larger than the other.

She had carved that face the autumn her husband went to sea and did not come back, and she had carved it badly because her hands would not stop shaking. The tree had kept it all these years, the grin widening while she stopped sleeping well. Tomas lifted the lantern down and turned it over, and the candle inside caught on its own, the way they always did, without a match.

Nell pressed her floury palm to the bark. The tree let out a long creak, the branches lowered themselves toward the cobbles, and every lantern bent its face toward the church. Tomas laughed, delighted. The bread was in the oven now, late, and she thought perhaps that would do for one night.