Watercolour-style tree tattoo with a black trunk and pink, purple and blue splashes of colour, placed on the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour tree on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A bare tree with a black trunk and branches sits at the centre of the image, with loose splashes of pink, purple and blue ink forming its canopy. The soft, bleeding edges and painterly washes give a watercolour effect, while the dark branches are drawn with crisp, fine lines. The tattoo is shown in close view on the side of a torso, with a grey garment held at the right edge of the frame.

Ribs Tree Branches Watercolour Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth Okonedo had been told the tree would die by the fourth winter, and by the ninth it was still dropping flecks of pigment onto the grow-bay floor. The ship ran on fifty-year rotations, and the bay lights dimmed to a false dusk at eighteen hundred hours, the only time she let herself sit on a crate of seed packets and look up.

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The tree had come out of the hold in a sealed tube stamped ARBOR, POST-EARTH, DO NOT WATER UNTIL ASKED. Nobody had asked. She had found the instructions in the archive's dead index, beside a scanned painting of a tree standing in rain, and understood that the seed was a gift from a painter who had wanted something to remember rain by. Her job was to keep the mist fine enough that the blossoms, when they came, would bleed the way the painting did.

In the eighth year they came, not green but violet and rose and a blue like the inside of a shell. Mara from the galley stood beside her with a tray of cold tea and frowned. "Those aren't flowers," she said. "They're spills." Ruth agreed. She had spent a career mixing dyes from fungus and beetle for the hull crews, and she knew what a spill looked like once it had been left to dry.

On the last night of the cycle she took a brush to the trunk, black as old boot ink, and drew the branches out fine and hard, the only lines she trusted. When the lights came up at dawn a petal drifted down onto her wrist and stayed there, wet, a small violet bruise of colour that would not wash away. She left it. The ship kept turning, the tree kept spilling, and somewhere a painter she would never meet had been right about the rain.