Black and grey dotwork tree inside a faceted crystal outline on a forearm, with a dotted circle and single dots above and below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree within a geometric crystal on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A branching tree with a full canopy sits inside a tall faceted diamond outline, its base merging into a crystalline form at the bottom. Stippled dotwork shades the foliage and crystal facets, while fine solid lines draw the outer geometry and a dotted circle frames the apex. The piece is rendered in black and grey against a dark background.

Dotwork Geometric Botanical Forearm Tree Crystal Diamond Foliage Circle Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate came up from the Sallow pit packed in wet clay, and Maud Tennant knew what was in it before Ivo had the lid off. Nobody else in Harrow Lane would have believed her. A sapling, she said, a rowan by the look of its branching, standing upright inside a glassy diamond of quartz, as though someone had planted it there and let the mountain close over the hole.

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Ivo wanted the thing polished flat and sold to the Tuesday dealers. Maud would not hear of it. She sat under the lamp for three weeks with a dental pick and a loupe, lifting the facets one pinprick at a time, the way her grandmother had shaded the margins of seed catalogues. She kept the outer edges clean as a ruler line and let the foliage stay soft and grey, a cloud of dots that caught the lamp and gave it back.

By April the leaves had come up through the cloudy base in a rush of tiny marks, and the shop filled with people who had heard about the tree. Some were kind. A boy from the chapel asked whether it could be watered. Ivo stopped grumbling about the dealers and started counting visitors. Maud only watched the crystal at noon, when the sun through the front window struck it just so and threw a ring of pinpricks across the ceiling, a small halo that hung above the point.

On the last day of the month she wrapped the stone in an old ledger page and carried it down to the quay, Ivo trailing behind with the empty crate. At the water's edge she set it on the stones and looked at it for a long while. Then she pried the lowest shards loose, one by one, and cast them into the tide. Ivo asked her why. She said the tree had been in the dark long enough, and that the sea was the only place left with room for a thing that wanted to spread.