Colour tattoo of a tree with green and yellow watercolour washes and dark splashes, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour tree on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A tree with bare branches rises from a dark curved base, with a single star-like sparkle to its left. The linework is loose and the green, yellow and teal washes bleed into one another, with dark ink splashes around the edges. The tattoo fills the upper thigh, with a person's hip and blue underwear visible at the top of the frame.

Thigh Tree Branches Leaves Star Splash

Find an artist for this

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

You are up the ladder at six in the morning with a jar of sap-green wash and a brush worn down to four hairs, painting a backcloth nobody has asked for. Ruth Pellow, who owns what is left of Pellow's Travelling Wonder, says the sponsors pulled out in March, the elephant went to a sanctuary in Wales, and the big top now drips where the centre pole used to hold it up. The backcloth is the one thing the crowds still stop to look at, so you paint it anyway.

Keep reading

The tree grows out of a dark curved hill you laid down last night, the colour of wet coal, with ink flicked at its edges like spray from a dropped bucket. Branches go on first, bare as February, because leaves are the last thing a budget can stretch to. Yellow follows, then teal, and the washes bleed into each other where the paper drinks them and won't let go.

Ruth comes out at noon with two mugs of stewed tea and stands a long time with her arms folded. "It isn't finished," she says. "No," you tell her. "It's waiting to be." She asks what goes in the top, and you dip the finest brush you own and put one white star to the left of the crown, a single sparkle you saved for the end.

On Friday the lorries leave before dawn. You roll the canvas tight and load it onto the flatbed, and from the lane, as the engine turns over, you can still see the star through the gap in the tarpaulin, still wet, catching the first light over the empty field.