Back of a woman with a watercolour-style tree tattoo in blue, orange and red washes with fine black branches, across the upper and mid back.

Watercolour tree across a back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A bare back with a tree tattoo that grows from the lower back and spreads its branches across the upper back and shoulder blades. The branches are drawn in fine black linework, with soft blue, orange and red washes and scattered dark speckles that give a loose, painterly effect. The subject stands against a dark blue and black backdrop, with the hands of a second person visible at the sides.

Botanical Back Tree Branches Splatter Wash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the spring the river at Lesser Wrayling came up over the weir and stayed up for nine days, and when it went down it left a tree standing in the mud behind the dye works. Nobody had planted it. Its trunk was the colour of a bruised plum, its roots went into the silt like ink into cloth, and old Mrs Hebble swore it had not been there the Sunday before.

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Ada Pell, who ran the vats, carried a bucket down to it every morning, because the tree drank the dye that spilt from the drains and gave something back. Blue at first light, while the vats were cold. Orange by noon, when the boilers ran. Red at dusk, when the men came off shift and their wives stood at the gate asking after them. Each time someone in the town told the truth to a person they had wronged, a branch reached a little further. Ada kept a tally on the inside cover of the order book.

By the autumn of 1957 the branches had reached the chapel wall and the tally stood at forty-one. Ada had one line still to write, the one she had put off for eleven years, so she went down to the mud in her coat with the pencil in her hand. She said it plainly, the way you would across a shop counter, and then she waited.

Nothing moved for a long minute. Then a single black twig crept over the fence and touched the page, and in the morning the tree was blue from root to crown, and the order book had a new name at the top of a clean page, written in her own hand.