Colourful watercolour-style tree inside a circle, tattooed on a person's shoulder, with pink, orange, green and blue tones.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour tree in a circle on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a bare tree with branches and roots enclosed in a circular outline. The linework is soft and the fill has a watercolour effect, with splashes of pink, orange, green and blue bleeding beyond the edges. It sits on the upper shoulder against a light green top, with the tree centred on the frame.

Botanical Shoulder Tree Circle Branches Root Splash

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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

Sit closer, and mind the nettles, for the lord's kitchen is still full of them. You will want to hear about the Hollin tree, which grew up through the hall of Carrow Keep the winter after the roof went. Nobody planted it. The masons swore a jackdaw dropped the seed down the chimney breast, and by the time anyone thought to pull it, the root had its fingers in the foundations.

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Old Mabry Tesh kept the gate then, and she would climb up each dusk with a bucket of whitewash and a wooden brush, because she had sworn the tree would turn colour once for every year it stood unpruned. Nobody believed her. But the bark took the wash the way a page takes ink, and in the damp weeks the trunk bled pink, then orange, then a green so sharp it hurt the eye. The children flicked splashes off their fingers onto the flagstones, and the stones kept them.

Then the surveyor came from the county with his brass ring and his measuring chain, and he drew a circle round the keep to mark where the new wall must stand. He drew it straight through the tree. Mabry climbed up with her brush and laid a single line along the curve, as if she were holding the circle shut with her own two hands. The surveyor left in a temper. The tree did not mind. It had stood through worse than a chalk ring.

So when you walk the keep tonight, look up through the branches and count the colours. Blue for the ones who left, green for the ones who stayed, and that bright splash of orange low on the roots, which is Mabry, who never once asked anybody's permission. Now the lamp is guttering, and I have told you more than the gate-warden would like.