Black and grey botanical tattoo of a tall redwood style conifer with exposed roots, shaded in fine detail on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tall conifer tree with roots on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tall, narrow conifer, resembling a redwood, rises the full length of the forearm with its trunk and spreading branches drawn in dense, fine black lines. The bark is shaded with grey tones and the roots spread at the base, giving depth. The tree is centred on a plain background of skin and a grey sleeve, and the tattoo is shown in clear, even light.

Botanical Realism Forearm Tree Conifer Root Branches Bark

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The floor at the Palais was laid in 1924 from boards that crossed the Atlantic in a timber ship, and Mr Ashworth would not let a single heel touch it until he had walked the length of the hall himself, head cocked, listening. I was fourteen and carrying a bucket of sawdust across the boards when he stopped me with one raised hand. 'Hear that? That's a tree that was never meant to end up under a waltz.' He tapped the board with his shoe and the whole room answered.

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The wood was red-brown and close-grained, with rings so tight you could count the years with a pin. My dad said the trees came from a coast so far west that the Americans measured them against church spires, and that one trunk would have filled our street from end to end. On Saturday nights the boards gave back the heat of two hundred pairs of feet, and by eleven the air smelt of resin, Brylcreem and spilt stout.

In 1941 a bomb took the north wall, and when the hall reopened in 1947 the old floor was prised up and stacked behind the bandstand. I was sent to fetch boards for the new cellar stairs. Under the bottom course, wrapped in oilcloth, I found a strip of bark as long as my arm and a pencil note in a clerk's hand: 'Humboldt, cut for the Palais, May 1923.' Someone had kept the roots too, a knotted bundle gone black and hard as horn.

Mr Ashworth was dead by then, so I asked his widow for one board. She told me to take two. I carried one home on my shoulder through the wet streets and laid it under my bed, and every night when the last tram rattled past the window, the whole frame of the house began, very faintly, to hum.