Colourful watercolour-style tree of life tattoo inside a circle, with roots and branches, on a person's shoulder against a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A tree of life sits inside a ring on the upper shoulder, with branches reaching up and roots curling down through the circle. The linework is soft and the shading is watercolour-like, with washes of pink, orange, green and teal that bleed into one another. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against plain white, with a green ruffled top visible at the edge.

Botanical Shoulder Tree of life Tree Circle Root Branches Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first thing Mrs Pardoe tells you about Gull House is that the old ash in the back yard is not to be pruned, whatever the council letters say. You nod over the ledger, your thumb still sore from the brass key, and promise you will leave it be. By August you have stopped counting the rooms and started counting the leaves that drop through the iron hoop her late husband bolted round the trunk.

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The roots have heaved up under the scullery flags, and the hoop has rusted to the colour of stewed tea. Each morning you peg washing on the line beside it, and the light through the branches turns the wet sheets pink, then orange, then a green like the sea before weather. The guests from Leeds insist it must be painted on. Mrs Pardoe says it is only the light, and that the light is the one thing in Gull House that has never sent a bill.

In September a lodger called Teodor leaves without paying. His room smells of salt and paraffin, and under the bed you find a tin of letters addressed to a woman in Ostend. Each one describes the ash, its roots working down into the chalk and its branches reaching for a boat that never came back into the harbour. You read them with the kettle going cold. The last letter is unfinished, and the nib has bled a teal blot across the word return.

At dusk you carry the tin out to the yard. The hoop catches the last of the sun and holds it like a ring of coins. You press a fallen leaf between the pages, close the lid, and leave the tin on the bench beside the back door, with the key set on top, where Mrs Pardoe will find it before the first guests come down for breakfast.