Two forearms with black fine line tattoos: a bare tree with stars on the left arm and an arched doorway with a crown and vine motifs on the right.

Tree and arched doorway forearm tattoos

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are shown side by side, each with a black tattoo. The left arm has a solid black silhouette of a bare, branching tree with small stars above it and roots at the base. The right arm has a thin outline arch with a crown, a small boat-like shape, a star and scrolling vine motifs. Black ink is used throughout against warm, orange-toned skin, with simple, uncluttered composition.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tree had been dead for three winters when the Harbour Warden sent for me, and nobody in the lower city believed it would leaf again. I was only a gardener's boy then, carrying buckets up the seventeen steps to the Sea Gate, and I had never once been allowed to lay a hand on the wood. Old Mirrin kept the stones swept and the lamps trimmed, and she told me the tree was not dead, only waiting for someone to stop watching it.

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On the morning the star came back, I climbed the arch to scrape lichen from the crown carved above the keystone. The little ship beneath it had lost its sail to the weather, and I thought of the captains who used to set their course by the light over that gate. Below me the fishing boats were already out, small as seeds on the grey water. Mirrin shouted up that I would break my neck, and I shouted back that I had found something green in the crack of the lintel.

It was a single leaf, pale as salt and no bigger than a thumbnail. We did not tell the Warden. We tied a strip of blue cloth to the lowest branch of the dead tree in the square and went home for supper. By the next spring there were forty leaves, and a sprig of ivy had found its way through the points of the crown.

I still climb the arch whenever I am back in the old city. The crack in the lintel is never quite the same colour two years running, and the crown has grown a little greener at the edges. Every spring I check it before anyone else is awake, because someone has to keep watching.

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