Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a bare tree inside a circle, set within a downward triangle with ornamental patterns, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree in circle within a triangle on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bare, twisting tree with spreading branches fills a solid circle at the centre of the design. The circle sits inside a downward-pointing triangle whose lower point is filled with a layered geometric pattern resembling stacked petals, and leaf motifs decorate the upper corners. The work uses bold black linework and fine detailed fills in black and grey, with the design centred on the forearm against a dark background.

Blackwork Geometric Forearm Tree Circle Triangle Leaves Geometric pattern Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift stalls between the second floor and the basement again, and you stand in the hum with a linen trolley and wait for it to decide. Nobody on nights complains about the lift. It is one of the few things in the building that keeps its own hours.

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By three the corridors have gone soft and amber. Marguerite Oyelaran, who has run nights on Ward 7 for longer than the hand dryers have worked, hands you a clipboard and a cup of tea gone cold. Bed nine's son has been sitting in the family room since midnight, staring at a window that shows only the car park and one old sycamore beyond the fence. He wants to know if the tree is dying. You tell him it is only February. He says his father used to say that about everything.

You take him a blanket and a cheese sandwich from the vending machine, and you stand with him at the glass. The moon hangs behind the bare branches, round and pale, and the limbs fork across it like handwriting in a hurry. Marguerite once told you that trees look most honest at night, when nobody is asking them to look like anything. He says his father planted a sapling in a yard in Leeds, years ago, and it grew too close to the washing line. You don't know whether that is true. It does not seem to matter.

At five the trolleys go quiet and the sky over the car park turns the colour of weak milk. You walk the corridor for the last time, past the lift that has finally agreed to move, and find him asleep in the chair with the blanket to his chin and one hand open on the sill. The tree is still there. So, you decide, is he.