Black dotwork tree tattoo on the upper arm and shoulder, with a dense stippled canopy and a brushstroke trunk ending in a small purple tint.

Tree with dotted canopy on an upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tree covers the upper arm and shoulder, its canopy built from fine stippled dots and spreading branches. The trunk is a bold, loose brushstroke that thins toward the bottom, with a few ink splatter dots beside it and a hint of purple at the base. The tree sits centrally on a pale, evenly lit arm against a plain background.

Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Tree Branches Trunk Ink splatter Dot

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

The steward at Harrowgate said the ash had been growing out of the chapel wall since before the roof fell in, and that nobody was to put an axe to it. Maud the washerwoman did not believe in curses, but she believed in firewood, and when the winter of the long frost came she climbed the broken stair with a hatchet in her apron and a candle stub in her teeth.

Keep reading

At the top the wall gave way to sky. The tree stood where the altar had been, its trunk black and wet, as if someone had dragged a loaded brush up through the stone and stopped halfway. Birds she could not name sat in its crown, and the crown was not leaves but a crowd of small dark marks, thousands of them, each one a seed of shadow. Maud lifted the hatchet. A spatter of ink-dark drops ran down the bark and pooled at the base, where the roots had gone purple with age.

She could not do it. Instead she sat under the branches and told the tree what the lord had done: how he had sold the mill, how her own son had gone to sea and never written, how the frost would take them all before spring. The tree said nothing, which was the best answer anyone in that castle had given her in years.

When the thaw came the steward found her asleep against the trunk with the hatchet still in her apron. The wall had cracked wider in the night, and a new shoot was pushing through the rubble beside her, thin as a pen stroke. Maud left it be. She said the castle had enough things falling down without her help.