Colour tattoo of bare black branches over teal, purple and orange watercolour washes, covering the upper arm of a person in a red top.

Watercolour branches on an upper arm sleeve

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A full upper arm sleeve of bare black branches reaching across the skin, with dark ink splatters among the twigs. Behind the linework, loose washes of teal, purple and orange give a painted, watercolour-like effect. Faint script runs down the lower part of the arm, and the background is plain black.

Upper arm Branches Tree Splatter Watercolour Script Sleeve

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 orchard keepers of Lessley Vale say the old pear tree on the north ridge was never planted by anyone. It came up in a night of hard frost, black-limbed and bare, and by morning the valley had painted it. Teal from the river mist, violet from the dusk over the quarry, orange from the lamps the miners carried home. Nobody could say who had done the painting, only that the colours had soaked into the bark like rain into bread.

Keep reading

Hannah Pell, who kept the dairy at the foot of the ridge, went up one evening with a jug of milk and a question. Her brother had gone down the mine in February and had not come up, and the foreman had written only that the seam had shifted. She set the jug on the root and asked the tree whether he was still under the hill. The branches did not move. But a black splatter of ink-dark leaves came loose from the highest twig and drifted down onto the milk, and where each one touched the surface a small word surfaced in the white, in her brother's careless hand.

She read them aloud until the words ran out. Then she poured the milk onto the roots, all of it, because that was what her grandmother had done with the last of anything you could not keep. The next morning a young man walked up the ridge road with dust in his hair and a lamp still lit on his cap, wondering aloud why the pear tree had grown so tall overnight, and why its branches were writing his name across the sky.