A tree tattoo with a brown trunk and branches, set against red, blue, green, yellow and pink paint-splash shapes, on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Splash-paint tree on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A bare tree with a brown trunk, branching limbs and spreading roots sits in the centre of the design. Behind and around the branches are loose, splattered shapes in red, pink, blue, green, yellow and orange, which give the impression of spilt watercolour paint. The ink is fully saturated and the image is framed from above on the upper back, with the subject centred.

Back Tree Branches Root Paint splatter Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ash in the yard of the Coronation Arms had been dead for years, or so Mrs Ibbotson said, and she was the one who wanted it felled. Oswin Teal, the decorator's lad, was sent up the ladder with the leftovers from the Grand Hotel job: a tin of vermilion, one of cobalt, a marigold, and a green that smelled of boiled cabbage. Ibbotson wanted the dead limbs cut back. Oswin had other ideas and an old stiff toothbrush.

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He worked with his back to the lane, drawing his thumb across the bristles so the colour spat off in fine hard flecks. Red burst against the grey bark like a split plum. Blue ran into the green, and yellow and orange ran into both, until the bare crown looked as if somebody had emptied a paint box over a jar of marbles. Half the village came out to watch. Mr Pennock from the bank said it was the most disgraceful thing he had ever seen, then asked whether he might borrow the toothbrush.

The paint was dry by teatime. Nobody could scrape it off the bark without taking the bark with it, and when the council man came in March with his saw, he stood under the splashes with his hands on his hips and could not bring himself to start the engine. The rooks came back that spring. Mrs Ibbotson swore the tree had leafed out in the wrong colours, which was a lie, though a kind one.

Oswin left for Leeds that summer with a tin of cobalt in his coat pocket. The ash still stands in that yard, its brown trunk planted firmly in the cobbles, and the children who sit beneath it on warm afternoons say the paint is the only foliage it has ever needed.