Colourful tree tattoo across a back, with red, pink, orange and green foliage, a shaded brown trunk and small falling leaves.

Seasonal tree across a back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A tree with a twisted brown trunk grows up the back, with branches spreading across the upper back. The trunk is shaded to look textured and realistic, while the foliage is painted in soft red, pink, orange and green, with small leaves drifting across the skin. The colour is layered and the edges are loose, giving the canopy a painterly look against the plain skin tone.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm,

Keep reading

The grafts took. I know you thought the knife work too fussy for an old man's hands, but the bark has closed over the joins and the sap runs clean through all four limbs now. The maple on the south side is already turning. The blossom you called a waste of wood came out last week, pink as a lamp through the frost on the east wall.

Prior Edwin came up this morning with his cloak over his arm and stood under the branches for a long time without speaking. He asked me which season the tree was meant to be. I told him it had been asked to be all of them at once, and that I had stopped being sure that was a fault. The brown trunk twists up from the root bed like someone who has spent a hundred years turning round to look at the world, and the leaves keep coming down on the path regardless of what the branch above them is doing.

I have kept one leaf for you, a small red one with the stalk still on, pressed in the back of the psalter where you will find it when you read tonight. Do not tell the novices which limb it came from. They will want to graft their own, and I am not ready to see the orchard in a mess.

Write back and say whether you are coming for the cutting in spring. The green limb is the one I am worried about. It is slow to wake, and I think it misses you.

Yours in the cold, Brother Columba

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