Colourful tattoo of a swirling tree with curling branches and pale orange, pink and teal rings, placed across the upper back and shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swirling tree on a shoulder blade

Back · Mixed · Photo

A tree with a thick brown trunk and curling, spiral-tipped branches spreads across the upper back, with its roots reaching down toward the shoulder blade. Around the branches sit concentric rings and dots in orange, pink, yellow and teal, set against soft ochre washes that give a painterly, glowing effect. The black and brown linework is bold and clean, and the photo is taken from behind at a slight angle, with a bookshelf blurred in the background.

Back Tree Branches Swirl Spiral Circle Dot Root

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamplighter's boy found the tree still warm on the morning after the storm, its branches curled tight as bracken and its roots lifted clean out of the chalk. Nobody in Coldharbour had ever seen it move, though everyone agreed it had leaned a little further toward the harbour each year, the way a man leans toward a conversation he wants to overhear.

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Old Mrs Pennock, who kept the chandlery, said the tree had been grown from a seed a sailor's widow sewn into the lining of her husband's coat. The coloured rings that hung among its branches were the lamps of boats that never came home. When a ship was lost, one ring slid down the trunk and rolled into the sea. Her own father had counted eleven in the winter of the great gale. The boy did not believe her, but he counted too, and that morning there were only ten.

He climbed the trunk with a bucket hooked on his belt, and in the crook where the roots met the earth he found a ring of yellow glass the size of a saucer, cool as a coin. Below it the ochre soil was stained like a wet painting. He carried it down the hill inside his shirt, past the bookshop with its faded almanacs, and up the steps to the widow's door.

She turned the ring over in her floury hands for a long while without speaking. Then she climbed onto a chair, reached as high as her arms allowed, and hooked it back on the lowest branch. The tree, which had been leaning, stood up straight. "Tell the harbour it's still here," she said, "and that somebody is counting."