Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour tree with profile silhouette on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A bare tree with fine black branches and spreading roots fills the image, and its trunk forms the outline of a face in profile. The canopy is washed with loose blue and yellow watercolour-style splashes, while the branches and roots use dark, soft-edged shading. The tattoo is centred on pale skin against a dark leather background.

Botanical Forearm Tree Branches Root Profile Face Watercolour Splashes

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mule stopped twice before the bend, and Ruth Calder knew the snow was coming because the ravens had gone quiet above Hollin Saddle. She had crossed the pass a hundred times with salt and wool, but never in November, and never alone. Her grandmother's rule came back to her as the wind picked up: say where you're going to the old rowan at the top, or it will not trouble itself to notice you.

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The tree stood alone on the saddle, bare as a gate post, its trunk split and grey. From the path you could see a face in it, a long nose, a closed mouth, the brow lifted as if it had been listening for a long time. Ruth stood in front of it with her hand on the mule's neck and felt foolish. 'Calder's girl, going down to Ashby with the salt,' she said anyway. 'My brother is waiting at the inn, and he will have given me up by dark.'

The snow closed in like a sheet thrown over a table. The path vanished, and the valley vanished, and there was only white and the shapes of branches above her. Then she saw the trunk again, faint in the grey, its face turned downhill. The roots were spread on the ground like fingers pointing the way. She followed them, one by one, down a gully where the stones were dry and the snow thinned to nothing, until a cairn rose out of the murk and then the lamp of the inn.

In March she climbed back up with a new load. The rowan had put out no buds, but on one branch a single yellow leaf had stayed through the winter, bright as a coin. Ruth touched it, then said thank you to the face in the bark, and went down the far side without looking back.