Colour tattoo on a woman's upper back and shoulder blade showing a black silhouette of a tree with a swing and falling leaves against a blue, pink and orange sunset.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree and swing silhouette at sunset on a shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a black silhouette of a tree with a figure on a swing beneath it, with dark leaves and stars drifting across the upper area. Smooth colour shading moves from blue at the top through pink and red to orange near the bottom, with pale swirling bands framing the design. The composition wraps over the shoulder blade, with the tree on the left and the swing on the right.

Shoulder Tree Silhouette Leaves Star Sunset Sky Swirl Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are nine the summer the Marigold is moored below the lock at Stanwick, and the only thing on the towpath worth having is the ash tree. Someone long ago tied a length of rope to its lowest limb, and by evening the whole bank smells of cut grass and diesel from the boats idling past. Your brother says the rope is rotten. You say it held him last Tuesday, so it can hold you.

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At six o'clock the sky over the cut goes the colour of a bruise, then blue, then the pink of the inside of a shell, then orange where the sun drops behind the poplars. You climb the bank with your sandals in your hand. The swing creaks. Ash keys and leaves come down around you like thrown confetti, black against the light, and when you pump your legs the boat's lamp swings with you, one yellow star wobbling on the water.

Your mother calls from the cabin. Your father is untying the lines, because the lock keeper has said they must be gone by morning and the river is rising. You don't want to hear it. You kick higher, past the top of the arc, until the swing seems to hang in the air for a moment and the tree lets go of its whole crop at once.

When you come down, the Marigold is already drifting out of its mooring, and the rope in your hands is the only thing left tied to anything. You stand in the grass with it, a little ashamed, and watch the leaves spin on the dark water after the boat, turning slowly as if they have somewhere to be.