Black ink tree of life enclosed in a circle on the inner wrist, with the hand raised and a ring on the fingers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life on the inner wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tree with bare branches and a trunk sits inside a thin black circle on the inner wrist. The linework is solid and even, with some fine branch detail and little shading, so the design reads as simple and graphic. The photograph shows a raised hand against a pale, bright room, and the tattoo is the only dark element in the frame.

Botanical Forearm Tree Tree of life Circle

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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

Mind the brazier, the lot of you, and don't lean on the horse. Right. You want the one about the bare tree? Then hush, because my knees are older than the big wheel and I'll not tell it twice.

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Every winter the fair pitched on the common above Harrowby, and every winter the same old elm stood by the gate with not a leaf on it. Mrs Cadwallader ran the hook-a-duck and swore the tree had been dead since her grandmother's day. Her boy Tom reckoned it was only sleeping. He used to climb it on a dare, right up to the crown where the branches thinned to wire, and he'd sit there counting the lamps coming on across the field.

One January night the frost came down so hard the guy ropes sang. Tom went up with a tin of cocoa and his father's lantern, and at the crown he found a ring of iron nails hammered into the bark, rusted to the colour of old pennies, with a length of red wool knotted through the middle. He untied it. The tree gave a creak like a stable door, and the whole common went still, as if somebody had held their breath.

Next morning the wool was gone, the nails were gone, and the lantern hung from a branch that had not been there the night before. Tom came down with frost in his eyebrows and never once after that climbed the elm, though he always laid a hand on its bark on the way past the gate. Some circles are kept shut for a reason, my loves. Now off you go to bed, and mind the lamps on your way.