Watercolour-style colour tattoo on a forearm showing a black silhouette tree with exposed roots and flying birds against pink, purple and teal washes.

Tree and birds on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black silhouette of a tree with spreading branches and exposed roots sits low on the forearm, above a thin ground line with small trees and grass. Several black silhouetted birds fly across the upper arm, set against soft, blotted washes of pink, purple, blue and teal. The colour fades and drips downward around the roots, and the composition runs vertically along the forearm.

Botanical Forearm Tree Root Bird Grass Landscape Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry from Ardnish left the old oak standing on the headland, its roots clawing at the cliff edge, and nobody in the village thought to cut it down. Mairi kept the wool shop by the slipway and knew the tree the way she knew her own hands. Each autumn the rooks came in from the north in a long ragged thread and settled in its branches until the boughs looked like they were made of coal. Her grandmother said the birds carried the names of drowned fishermen up to the sky, one name a bird, and that the roots went down to the water to fetch them back.

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The winter the boats stopped going out, a stranger came up the track with a leather case and asked for shelter. He drew the tree on the back of a wrapping paper while she sorted skeins, quick strokes that did not look like a tree at all until he turned the paper round. Then the roots were there, running under the shop floor and out through the floorboards toward the harbour. He said he would pay in colour. She laughed and said the only colour on the island was the sea.

He painted for three days in the back room, and when he came out his fingers were blue to the knuckle. On the fourth morning the rooks were gone and the sky was washed pink and teal over the bay. Mairi walked down to the slipway and found the tree's shadow lying across the water, with the birds scattered over it, and a small green thing growing at the foot of the ferry ramp that she had never noticed before. She counted the rooks again and the number came out right.