Realistic colour tattoo of a tall redwood tree with ferns and red berries forming a full sleeve from the upper arm down to the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Redwood tree sleeve on arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A tall conifer with layered green foliage rises up the upper arm, and its trunk continues down the forearm. Ferns and clusters of small red berries fill the lower forearm near the wrist. Soft shading and natural greens and browns give the piece a detailed, painterly realism.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Forearm Tree Conifer Fern Berry Leaves Foliage Sleeve

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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

Nobody in Ardrossan believed a seed could cross the Atlantic in a coat pocket, so I stopped trying to convince them. My brother Tomas had carried it home from the coast north of San Francisco, a cone no bigger than a walnut, and by the spring after his funeral it had split open on my kitchen windowsill and sent up a shoot the colour of a new pin. I potted it in an old tin bath because the back garden was too shaded for anything sensible, and every April I measured it against the fence post with a length of red string.

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The string stopped being long enough in the third year. The bath went, then a half-barrel, then the raised bed Dougie from next door built with more enthusiasm than skill. By the time the council wrote about the roots lifting the wall, the thing was taller than the chimney and smelt, after rain, like a cedar chest. I wrote back that the tree had been here first, which was not strictly true, but the man from the council had never met Tomas and seemed to think that settled it.

Dougie said I ought to be frightened of it, and I was, a little, on the nights the wind came off the Firth and the whole crown leaned and creaked like a ship's timber. Mostly I was patient. Redwoods take their time, the leaflet said, and so did I, growing older beside something that refused to hurry.

This April I tied the red string around the trunk at the height of my own shoulder and left it there, a little higher than last year. The knot is loose. I expect it will need retying when the wind comes, and I expect I will be the one to do it.