Black and grey botanical tree branches and birds in a night sky across a realistic arm sleeve, covering the upper arm and forearm.

Tree and birds sleeve on an arm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bare arm shows a sleeve tattoo of bare tree branches with fine foliage reaching up the forearm. Above it, the upper arm carries a dusky night sky with small stars and several birds in flight, and a yin and yang motif sits at the top edge. The work is in black and grey with soft shading and fine detail, set against a dark background.

Botanical Realism Forearm Upper arm Tree Branches Bird Night sky Star Yin yang Foliage Sleeve

Find an artist for this

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

The hall still smells of floor polish and gym socks, and you know before you reach the trestle table that the name badges will be wrong. Someone has printed Maureen's maiden name on yours. You stand there with the lanyard in your fist, looking at a spelling you haven't used since the year the oak behind the science block came down in the gale. Nobody remembers who planted it. Everybody remembers the boy who climbed it at dinner break and wouldn't come down until the bell.

Keep reading

You find him by the squash-ball cabinet, grey at the temples, sleeves rolled to the elbow. He holds out a pint of cloudy cider and nods at your forearm, where the old ink has blurred into the freckles. He doesn't mention the trees. He tells you instead about the swifts that nest under the new sports hall roof, how the caretaker wants them moved before the autumn, and how he's been writing letters to the council in green ink because the blue ones got ignored.

Later, out on the car park, the sky goes the colour of a bruise and the first starlings lift off the playing field in a loose, shifting knot. You watch them break apart and re-form above the bare branches of the replacement sapling, eleven years old and still too thin to hold a rope swing. Your old friend says the trick is patience with anything that has to learn to stand. You tell him that's the most sensible thing you've heard all night, and you mean it.