Watercolour-style tree tattoo with black bare branches, pink, purple and teal splashes and two small birds, on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour tree with birds on a lower leg

Botanical · Calf · Colour · Photo

A bare tree with black branches and a twisted black trunk sits at the centre of the design, with two small silhouetted birds flying at the upper right. Soft splashes of pink, orange, purple and teal fill the area behind the branches, with the linework kept dark and crisp against the washes. The tattoo sits on the lower leg and is photographed straight on against a plain skin background.

Botanical Calf Tree Branches Bird Splashes Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maddoc came down the lane with the cold still on his shoulders and said the old ash on the ridge had dropped every leaf overnight. I kept stirring the woad vat. Ash does not drop its leaves in one night, I told him, not in the middle of the dyeing month. He said that was what I had said in spring too, when its crown came up pink as sunrise on the river and the whole valley walked out to stare.

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We climbed together, boots slipping on frost where the spring ran off the hill. The ash stood alone with its trunk twisted like a rope wrung dry, and every branch was black against a sky the colour of pewter. Nothing green anywhere. Only the stain on the grass below, still faintly orange and violet where our madder runoff had soaked into the earth for thirty summers. Two birds sat on the highest twig, small as thrown dice.

For thirty years we had poured our waste down the hill into that spring, meaning no harm, and the tree had drunk it. Each season its branches came up in colour: rose, then saffron, then the blue green of woad. Traders paid coin to see it. Maddoc wanted the sluice shut, the works moved downstream, and the ash left to die grey like honest wood.

The birds lifted together and wheeled over the valley, two dark shapes crossing the pale sky. I watched until they were gone, then turned to my brother. Open the sluice, I said. Let it drink one more season. He did not argue, which told me he had been waiting all morning for me to say it.