Fine line botanical tattoo of a tree with spreading roots and a curled swirl on a forearm, in dark blue-black ink.

Tree and swirl design on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tree with a wide, branching trunk and a tangle of roots runs across the forearm, with a curled swirl and an ornamental flourish near the top of the design. The linework is fine and somewhat sketchy, with shading in the crown and roots. The ink is dark blue-black against pale skin, and the hand is open at the left of a softly blurred background.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Tree Root Branches Swirl Ornament

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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

The orchard men of Veyl Hollow say the great oak was never planted, only remembered, and that is why its roots run the wrong way, down through the hill and up again under the river. My grandmother told it to me on the bench outside the mill, shelling peas into her apron. Her own grandmother had carried the cutting over the mountains in a boot, wrapped in wet wool, when the old king burned the groves. The cutting took root in a stranger's yard and grew so fast it cracked the wall.

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There was a clockmaker in the lower town named Ansel Dray who could not sleep for the ticking of his own shop. He went up the hill one night with a lantern and a spool of silver wire, meaning to bind the oak's crown so it would stop growing into the sky and leave the town its moon. He wound the wire round the lowest bough, and the bough, feeling itself held, curled its tip like a fern and gave him a single green leaf. Ansel put the leaf in his waistcoat pocket and came down the hill with the wire still in his hand.

He never bound the tree. He spent the rest of his life making clocks whose hands turned backwards whenever someone in Veyl Hollow told a lie, and nobody in the town has ever asked him why. The leaf is still in the drawer of his workbench, dry as paper, and if you hold it to the lamp you can see the tiny roots he drew on it, running down the wrong way.