Small black fine line tattoo of a swirling tree with the word Life beneath it, on the inner wrist.

Swirling tree and Life on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of a tree with curling, spiral branches sits on the inner wrist, with the word Life in a simple sans serif script below the trunk. The linework is thin and even, with solid black fill on the trunk and the lettering and no visible shading. The pale skin and dark leather-look surface behind the arm keep the design clearly in focus, with the hand resting below.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Tree Swirl Branches Life Script

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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

Old Dunstan Reeve had grafted apple trees in the Wye valley for forty years, and he never let anyone cut a scion from the crooked tree behind the cider shed. "Every wind off the Malverns has had a go at it," he said, "and it still fruits." Nell, the girl sent up from the village to sweep the packing shed, asked why nobody cut it down for firewood.

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In March the frost came hard and blackened the upper limbs. Dunstan went out with his knife and a roll of raffia and found the trunk still green under the bark. He took a sliver of wood from the one spiral shoot that had curled back towards the ground and bound it to a young rootstock in the nursery row. Nell held the lamp. Her fingers ached with cold, and he told her to keep the flame steady, because a graft only takes when the cut faces are clean and pressed close.

By August the grafted whip had put out three leaves, then a dozen, and a final shoot had looped over itself in a tight curl, exactly like the parent. Dunstan walked the row with his pipe unlit. "Not a copy, really," he said. "More a carrying on." Nell wrote one word on a tag in pencil, letter by letter, and pushed it onto the stake so the young tree would know what it was for.