Colour tattoo of a tree on a person's upper back, with bare branches and yellow leaves on the left and red and green foliage on the right.

Seasonal tree across a shoulder blade

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A brown tree with grey shaded bark and twisting branches fills the upper back, reaching up from a flared trunk at the bottom. The left side has bare branches with yellow leaves, while the canopy on the right blends red, orange, purple and green in soft, painterly strokes. The tree is centred on the shoulder blade and shown from behind against plain skin.

Botanical Back Tree Branches Leaves Autumn leaves Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The circus came over the hill at Hollin Fold in the year the bears were sold, and it had only one tree left to its name. Old Mother Abel, who kept the wagons, carried it on the lead cart in a barrel of wet sacking, a sapling no higher than a man's knee. Nobody asked her why. She said a tent without a tree is only canvas.

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Each town they came to, the tree grew one side of itself. In spring at Brackley the right-hand limbs leafed green, and the ringmaster, Tobias Crane, wept into his moustache because the crowd was small and the rain was coming sideways. In summer at Coldharbour the red arrived, and the tumblers forgot their count. The left side stayed bare. It always stayed bare on the side the wind came from, and nobody could say whether that was the tree's good sense or its grief.

When the money ran out at Wenlow, the troupe gathered under the branches and voted to sell the wagons. Abel said nothing. She climbed the bare limbs at dusk and tied a strip of the red tent to each one. By morning the yellow had crept up the left side like a lamp being turned up, and a girl who had been sleeping under the cart woke with leaves settling on her face, warm as bread from the oven.

They did not sell the wagons. Crane still drives the lead cart, and when children ask where the tree goes in winter, he tells them it travels with the show, and that somewhere on the road it is always autumn.