Watercolour-style tattoo of a bare tree with blue, orange and pink washes and black linework across a person's upper back.

Watercolour-style tree on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A bare tree with spreading branches fills the upper back, drawn with fine dark lines and soft dotted texture. Blue, orange and pink washes bleed outward from the trunk and branches, giving a loose, painted look. Colour ink dominates the composition, with the trunk and fine branch tips anchoring the black linework against the skin.

Botanical Dotwork Back Tree Branches Watercolour Splatter

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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 man at the window slides a clear bag across the counter, and you know what's inside before you open it: a sapling, roots wrapped in wet kitchen roll, stems no thicker than a pencil. The declaration form says ornamental nursery stock, one item. You reach for the stamp, then stop, because the bark has a faint sheen of blue, as though someone rinsed a brush over it on the way here.

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"It came from the river bank at Haldane's Ford," he says, before you ask. "My grandmother's tree grew there. The floods took the bank, so I dug up what I could." He tells you the clay under it is the colour of rust, and that the blossom falls pink when the spring is wet. You nod and tilt the bag under the strip light. The branches fan outward, thin as hair, and where the water has soaked into the roll the colour bleeds into the paper like paint into a cloth.

You think of your father's allotment, the leeks he never managed to grow straight, and you find yourself asking whether it will survive the drive north. The man says it will if he keeps the roots wet and the window down. You believe him, which is not something you usually do at this hour.

You stamp the form, write *permitted, do not overwater* in the margin, and slide it back. He tucks the bag under his arm like a loaf. When he's gone, there's a smear of blue on your thumb that won't wash off, and you leave it there until the end of the shift.