Colour tattoo of a bare tree with orange and red watercolour-style splashes wrapping around the forearms.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree with orange splashes on forearms

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two forearms are shown side by side, each carrying a bare tree with a twisting brown trunk and branches. Soft orange and red splashes of colour sit behind and around the branches, suggesting foliage. The trunk and roots are shaded in greys and browns, with fine linework defining the bark, and the design runs down the length of the forearms.

Botanical Forearm Tree Trunk Branches Leaves Root Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top had stood against the old oak on Sallow Common for thirty-one seasons, and by October that oak was the only thing on the field still standing straight. My father liked to say it was our best act. It never needed feeding, never sulked about the damp, and every autumn it went up in colour like a flare someone had lit for us.

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That year the takings barely covered the hay. Uncle Tobias sold the calliope in the second week, and the clowns took their paint pots down to the Fox and didn't come back. I was twelve and the only one left who could climb. So each evening I went up with a tin of rust-red and a stiff brush, and I flicked orange and scarlet into the bare branches the way the sky had done it for us, until the trunk looked like it was burning from the inside and the crowd at the gate could pretend they'd come for the tree.

Dad found me on the last night, my hands stiff with dried paint, and he didn't shout. He stood under the branches a long while, then said the roots went further down than the tent pegs ever would, and a thing with roots that deep didn't need an audience. We struck the canvas at dawn. The oak stayed where it was, twisting out of the frost as if it had been waiting for a reason to move.

Years later a woman at the bridge asked me who had painted the tree, and I told her the weather did, which was true enough.