Watercolour-style tree tattoo with black branches and green, blue and yellow washes on the upper thigh.

Watercolour tree on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A tree with bare black branches rises from a trunk at the base of the design, set against soft green, blue and yellow washes that suggest foliage and a night sky. Small white sparkles and dark ink splatters sit around the tree, and a green brushed arc curves behind it. The design is shown up close on a bare upper thigh, with dark clothing at the left edge of the frame.

Thigh Tree Branches Star Sparkle Splatter Swirl Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ground was iron that January, and the old apple tree at the top of Hollin Farm had dropped its last leaf in October. Nell Farrow went up the field at dusk with a lantern and a bread knife, because her father said the tree had stopped bearing and would have to come down before the thaw. She did not argue. He had said the same of the mare, and the mare had lived to twenty-six.

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Under the bare branches the sky over the ridge was thick with stars, more than she had ever seen from the yard. Her grandmother used to say that trees keep the summer folded up inside them, the way a letter keeps its ink after the words have been read. Nell laid her palm on the trunk. It was not cold. Beneath the bark something moved slowly, green, then gold, then a blue like the inside of a mussel shell, and the wood hummed like a kettle a long way off.

Then the tree spoke, plainly, the way a neighbour might over a gate. It said it had carried the summer for a hundred years and was tired, and would she hold it for a while if it gave her a piece. Nell set down the lantern. She cut one twig no longer than her finger, with a swollen bud at its tip, and wrapped it in her scarf.

She put it in a jar on the kitchen windowsill. Her father looked at it for a long time and said nothing about the saw. By March the bud had opened into five white flowers, and by June the branch was heavy with small green apples. If you walk up Hollin field on a clear night, the old tree is still bare, with a single star caught in the crook of its highest limb, keeping watch over the summer it lent away.