Colour tattoo of a tree with a serene carved face, glowing heart, sun, moon and mushrooms on an upper arm, in a surreal botanical style.

Tree spirit with roots and celestial scene on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A tree trunk forms a face with closed eyes, with branches reaching up into a green canopy and a glowing red heart, sun, moon and planet-like shapes set in a blue and orange sky. Mushrooms and fine black roots spread across the bottom, and small birds fly near the top. The woodgrain and facial shading are soft, with bold black outlines around the colour fills and a dark, speckled background of stars or texture.

Botanical Upper arm Tree Face Root Heart Sun Moon Mushroom Bird Sky Planet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Hennie Marl kept a wych elm at the top of the common, and it was the only thing in Ashcombe nobody had ever managed to cut down. Men came with saws in the dry years and went home with blistered palms and no wood. The tree just stood there with its face sunk in the bark and its eyes shut, as though it were dreaming of somewhere a long way off.

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The summer the lightning took the church weathervane, a girl called Tamsin climbed the elm to fetch her brother's kite and found a hollow in the trunk where something was beating. It was red and warm and as big as a loaf, and it pulsed the way a sleeping dog's flank does. She laid her hand on it. The whole tree sighed through its leaves, the rooks lifted off in a loose wheel, and where they flew the sky came out in colours nobody in the village had a name for. A sun rose low over the millpond, a pale moon hung beside it, and a rust-coloured planet turned slowly above the church tower.

She asked the elm what it was dreaming about. It told her, in the creak of its branches, that it was dreaming of the sky, and that the sky was only ever a dream the roots had. So Tamsin dug at the base of the trunk where the roots went down, and she pressed in three red-capped mushrooms, the way her grandmother had shown her to plant a wish.

She grew old on the common. When her own heart slowed, they carried her to the elm and set her beneath it, and the roots took her in gently, the way the earth takes a cup of water. In spring the mushrooms came up thick around the trunk, and the rooks wheeled over Ashcombe, and the village said the elm had finally woken up.