Back view of two legs with a watercolour-style tree on the left calf and a splashed bird on the right thigh, in pink, blue, green and teal.

Watercolour tree and bird on both legs

Calf · Colour · Photo

The left calf carries a loose, splashed tree in pink, magenta, green and blue, with thin branches fading out at the edges and a dark ink drip running down towards the ankle. On the right leg, a bird in flight is built from similar painterly splashes near the back of the knee and thigh. The composition is open and asymmetrical, and the soft colour blends rely on bare skin showing through.

Calf Thigh Tree Bird Splashes Drip Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rowan at the forest's edge had given its colour to the village for three winters, and by the fourth the dyer's vats were running thin. Agnes Hollin went out with a bucket and a knife, meaning to take a single cutting, but the tree had other ideas. Its bark wept a violet ink that ran down the trunk and pooled in the roots, and where it touched the grass the grass turned the blue of a jay's wing.

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The bird came down at dusk. It was no bigger than a thumb, a wren or a finch, and it landed on the lowest branch and looked at her with one black eye. "You take too much," it said, in the plain way things talk in old stories, and Agnes, who had never once been scolded by a finch, sat down on the wet ground and listened.

The bird offered a bargain. Leave the tree a season to rest, it said, and it would show her where the colours went when the vats were dry. So she let the knife fall. Through the spring the bird flew ahead of her, low over the ferns, and everywhere it passed a splash of pink or green rose out of the earth like a dropped paint pot. By midsummer she had a hillside of colour and a bucket of dye that never ran out.

The village still tells it that the rowan was never quite the same. Its branches thinned to threads at the edges, as if the colour had been spent on the far side of the wood, and a dark line of ink still runs from its roots toward the river. The bird comes back each spring to check the bargain. Agnes kept her word until she died, and every dyer since has left the last cutting on the tree.