Colour tattoo of a tree of life on a shoulder, with blue snowflakes, pink blossom, green leaves and orange autumn leaves, set on brown Celtic knotwork roots.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life with four seasons on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A tree of life fills the frame, with brown branches and Celtic knotwork roots at the base. Each section of the canopy shows a different season: blue snowflakes, pink blossom, green leaves and orange and red autumn leaves. The linework is bold and dark, with the colour shaded softly inside the outlines.

Botanical Shoulder Tree of life Tree Snowflake Blossom Leaves Autumn leaves Celtic knot Branches Root

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You hold the keys to Dunmorrach because nobody else would take them. The castle has been roofless since the Morrow wars, its curtain wall lying in the heather like a dropped belt, and the only thing still standing in the great hall is the ash that split the flagstones a century ago. Its roots have gone down through the old drains and knotted themselves under the floor in patterns the Holloway brothers swore were made by hand, not by weather.

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Every spring the tree puts out blossom above the broken arch, pink as a sweet shop window, and the walkers photograph it and leave crisp packets in the moat. In autumn it sheds rust and gold across the hall, and you spend a whole week sweeping. Winter is the strange part. The snow comes in sideways through the windows and settles on the top branches only, blue-white in the grey light, while the lower limbs stay bare and sulking until the thaw. You have never been able to explain that to the surveyor from the council.

Last March the council sent a man with a chainsaw and a letter. You walked him up the hill at dawn, past the gatehouse where the shutters hang by one hinge, and let him stand under the crown. He looked up for a long time. Then he turned round, sneezed in the cold, and said the tree was in better health than he was.

You didn't tell him the tree was the only thing that had ever kept the place from falling in. You just caught a rust-red leaf that had drifted down onto his shoulder while he talked and handed it to him, and watched him fold it into his pocket as if it were a receipt.