Black ink quote in a serif-style font running down a forearm, with a circular tree of life design near the wrist, in black and grey ink.

Tree of life and quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink quote runs down the inner forearm in a clean sans-serif style, set in several lines that stagger from the elbow towards the wrist. Below it, near the wrist, a circular tree of life is drawn in fine black linework, with branches filling the upper half and roots spreading across the lower half. The photograph is taken indoors against a brown quilted fabric, with warm lighting and a slightly soft focus.

Lettering Botanical Forearm Tree of life Tree Root Branches Circle Quote Text Lettering

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

Now, the acorn rode in the bread locker, wrapped in a wet flannel, because old Mrs Pell had made the cook swear it would not go over the side with the peelings. Eleven weeks out of Falmouth, with the Southern Ocean grinding at the hull like a mill that never stopped, and every man aboard thought she was soft in the head. Carry an oak to the Antipodes, they said, when there's oak enough down there to choke a horse.

Keep reading

Tom Ashby was the one who had to tend it. He was twelve, the smallest boy aboard, and the captain's order was that the boy would mind the thing or go down the ladder for a month of swabbing. So every watch he unwrapped the flannel, looked at the split green shoot pushing out of the husk, and wrapped it up again. The carpenter called it a fool's errand. The second mate read aloud from a dog-eared book of verse that said living things come by a different road to everything, and Tom didn't know what that meant, only that the shoot had grown a finger's length since Madeira.

On the ninety-second day the pilot's light showed a smudge of land, and the shoot had put out roots, pale and wormy, that reached right through the cloth into the tin. Tom pricked his thumb trying to free them. He carried the tin up on deck in both hands, and a sailor who had been sick since the Horn took it from him and said, plain as the weather, "Well, then. Plant the useless article before we all go soft."

They put it in a patch of red soil behind the customs shed at Port Adelaide, and nobody made a speech. Tom went back to the ship. Years later a letter came to the owners from the shed's keeper. The oak now shaded his whole yard, it said, and its roots had lifted one corner of the shed floor. He had decided, the keeper wrote, to forgive it.