Black linework tree with spreading branches, leaves and exposed roots, with small yellow accents, on the inner forearm, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree with roots on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A tree with a full canopy of leaves and blossom-like shapes and exposed roots spreading at the base is drawn in black linework. A few leaves and fruit are filled with yellow, while the trunk and roots are left in outline and light shading. The tree is centred on the forearm against a plain skin background, with a blurred figure in an orange top and blue jeans in the far background.

Botanical Forearm Tree Root Leaves Branches Blossom Fruit

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sycamore came up through the car park at Hollins House the spring after the council resurfaced it, a single whip of green pushing through a crack beside Mrs Okafor's bins. Nobody planted it and nobody wanted it. Mr Pryce from the fourth floor said it would have the drains up inside five years, and he wrote to the housing office about it twice.

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I was nine, and I was the only one who checked on it. Every morning before school I crouched by the kerb with my bag still on and counted the leaves. Four, then nine, then more than I could count. By the summer the roots had lifted a slab clean out of the tarmac and sat there like knuckles. Dad said leave it alone, it was a weed, and then one evening he came down with a bucket of washing-machine water, poured it over the roots, and never mentioned it again.

The fruit came in October, small and hard and yellow as a boiled sweet. Mum called them keys, the way they twirled down onto windscreens. Mr Pryce got out to scrape one off his saloon and stood there a long time looking up into the canopy with one hand flat on the roof.

Hollins House came down in March. The tree didn't. They fenced it off with orange mesh and left it standing in the rubble, and I still walk past it on the way to the bus, the roots gripping the bare concrete as if they've decided to keep hold of something.