Colourful tree canopy above a DNA double helix trunk with brown roots, tattooed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree and DNA helix with roots on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A tree canopy in green, orange, blue and purple sits above a double helix that forms the trunk, with bare brown roots spreading downward beneath it. The canopy is shaded in soft, blended washes, while the helix has coloured rungs and grey outlines. The tattoo is centred on the upper arm against a plain skin background, with the wearer's striped maroon top visible at the edges.

Upper arm Tree Root

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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

Sit close, the lamp is failing again and I'll not waste oil on a story you've heard already. You want the one about the tree that grew down instead of up. Ask any grandmother on Deck Nine and she'll tell you it was the year the grow-lights went amber, and old Ilse Varga climbed into the seed vault with a cutting knife and a jar of soil she had carried from Earth in her coat pocket.

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The tree had no proper name, only the one the children gave it, which was Pale Ladder, because its trunk was two ropes twisted round each other, and between them ran rungs striped grey and bright like the paint we had left: rust, cobalt, a sickly green. Ilse said every rung held a little of the people who had come aboard before us, every letter of them, and that a tree should carry its own instructions the way a letter carries its address. Nobody understood her. We grew the canopy first, dabbing leaves in the colours the vault had kept, and it spread across the ceiling of the grow-bay like weather.

Then the roots. She wanted them to go down through the deck grating, into the water tanks where the cold settled. They came out thin, then thick, brown as sea-wrack, fanning out under the floor until the whole bay smelled of wet earth and something sweet. The engineers swore at us. Ilse only laughed and said the ship had been carrying soil for three hundred years and had never once been allowed to plant it.

When she died the roots were already in the tanks. My daughter sits under the canopy each evening and presses her palm to the bark, and she says the trunk is warm on the side that faces the stars. I don't argue. I just tell her to mind the rungs, because every one of them is somebody's name, and a name is a thing you keep by touching it.