Watercolour-style tree tattoo with bare black branches and blue and yellow wash on the inner forearm and wrist.

Watercolour-style tree on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A bare black tree with thin branches and roots stands on the inner forearm and wrist, with splashes of black ink dotted around it. Its canopy is a loose wash of blue, pale cyan and yellow, with the ink edges left soft and uneven. The background is a plain grey wall, and the hand is held relaxed with the palm facing the camera.

Forearm Tree Branches Root Sky Splatter Wrist Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had painted the same backdrop for nine winters, and each year the tree had fewer branches to lose because it had never been much more than a few strokes of black. The canvas hung at the back of the big top like a curtain that had forgotten its play. Mr Sorensen, who owned three elephants and a lame camel, wanted the sky done again before the Kent dates. He said the children at the seaside stops had stopped looking up.

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She mixed the blue from a tin of marine paint he had bought off a bankrupt yacht club, a pale cyan from what was left of a watercolour set, and a yellow that smelled faintly of lamp oil. She wet the canvas with a sponge the way her father had taught her and let the colour bleed where it wanted to go. The branches she kept for the brush alone, thin and black, and where the ink flicked off the bristles she let it land. Her father always said a tree that looked too tidy was lying about the weather.

On the last night in Margate the generator failed halfway through the trapeze act. In the dark the only light came through the open flap from the pier, and Ada stood with her hand flat against the damp canvas, feeling for the roots she had painted at the bottom. When the lamps came back on, the crowd was clapping for a clown who had not yet come out. Ada looked up at the wash of blue and yellow, uneven at the edges, and thought that somebody under that sky might still be counting the branches.

She packed the sponge in the morning and left the canvas rolled on the lorry, where the paint would keep.