Thin black branching tattoo with watercolour pink, blue and purple washes along the centre of a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour branch and roots down the back

Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo

A tall, thin black line runs vertically down the centre of the back, branching at the top into fine twigs and at the base into roots. Soft pink, blue, purple and green watercolour-style washes bleed around the crown and the root system, leaving the linework crisp. The image is a close, straight-on shot of bare skin with a blue garment visible at the edges.

Fine line Botanical Back Branch Tree Root Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sapling had been in the bucket for nineteen days when the mate decided it was bad luck. Nobody aboard the Corisande wanted to say so plainly, but Tobias Reyne came down to the galley with his cap in his hands and said it anyway. Ada Lorne, who had dug the thing out of the cliff at Porthgwarra with her bare fingers, said nothing and kept scooping seawater into the tin.

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The weather turned south of the Azores. Waves came over the rail in grey sheets and the tin skittered from one side of the hold to the other. Ada lashed it to the foot of the mainmast with a length of spun yarn and sat beside it through the night, watching the lantern swing. Where the water slopped over the rim it left bright streaks on the boards, pink and blue where the lamp caught the spray, and she thought of the wet clay under the cliff where the roots had gone deep.

At dawn the sea lay flat as pewter. Tobias found her asleep against the mast with the tin in her lap. The little tree had put out two new leaves in the night, pale and furled like the ears of a young hare. He looked at it a long while, then went back up on deck without a word, and when the bell rang for the morning watch he took the first turn at the bucket himself.

They made Falmouth eleven days later. The tree went into the vicarage garden, where it still leans towards the wind.