Multicoloured painterly pine tree tattoo on the side of the ribs, with a black dotwork mandala on the upper arm at the left edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour pine tree on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A tall pine tree is tattooed vertically on the side of the torso, with a short trunk at the bottom. Its branches are built from loose, soft-edged brushstroke shapes in red, orange, blue, green, yellow and purple, with darker blue-black strokes between them. At the left edge, a black dotwork mandala with fine radiating patterns sits on the upper arm, and two thin dark lines run down the right side of the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Ribs Upper arm Pine tree Tree Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the kettle, it spits when the wind comes round the hill. Now, the winter the Halloran and Vane Travelling Circus ran out of money, its painter was Ned Carrow, a thin man who could make a clown's nose look sad from forty yards. The company had one pine left standing on the common, a tall black thing the ringmaster wanted felled for tent poles, because the canvas was rotting and nobody could afford new.

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Ned had no greens left, nor reds, only grey wash and a tin of sooty blue. So he went round the wagons with a bent brush and scraped what the others had thrown out. A strip of red from the strongman's cart. Orange lifted off the lion's gate. Yellow from the juggler's hat, purple from the hem of the fortune-teller's shawl, which she gave him for a shilling and a promise not to tell. He dabbed them onto the pine in short, soft flicks, one colour after another, and between them he laid blue-black shadow, so the whole thing seemed to breathe.

The axe-man came at dusk with the ringmaster trailing behind him. Ned said nothing. He only stood with his back against the trunk and watched the last sun slide behind the hill, lighting the paint so it caught like wet glass. The ringmaster looked a long while. Then he took his pocket watch out, the last thing of value the company owned, and pressed it into the axe-man's palm. Go home, he said. Tell them we're sleeping under the sky this year.

They did. Every spring after, when the rain comes off the hill, the bark still shows a flicker of red, and the children who play on the common swear it's a tree that has never quite decided what colour it wants to be.