Watercolour style willow tree with green weeping foliage, blue sky and a black silhouette on a swing, tattooed on the outer thigh.

Willow tree and swing on thigh, watercolour look

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A willow tree with weeping green foliage fills the upper part of the design against a loose blue wash that suggests sky, with a few small light dots in the blue. A small black silhouette of a figure sits on a swing hanging from a grey-shaded trunk, and the roots spread out at the base in soft, fading black lines. The soft edges and blended colour give a painterly look across the thigh, with colour ink dominating the foliage and sky.

Thigh Silhouette Sky Root Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swing was the only thing my father ever hung properly, and he hung it in the willow at the bottom of Cutts Meadow the summer I turned nine. Mum said the tree would drop its branches on us one day, but the willow only ever leaned, the way old men lean on a gate, and we swung out over the river with our heels higher than the reeds.

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At night the sky above the meadow went deep enough to drown in, and Dad would stop the swing with his boot and point out the stars he knew. He knew four, maybe five, and he gave them the names of men he'd worked with at the quarry. Orion was Uncle Ned. The little smudge of light near the moon he called Mrs Pargeter's hens, which made me laugh until I hiccupped.

The council came the spring I left school. They wanted the meadow for a new bypass, and the willow stood in the way of the survey pegs. Nobody asked us. I went down on the last morning and sat on the seat while the man with the chainsaw waited politely by his van, and I looked up through the thinning leaves at the strip of sky that was left.

Dad didn't say much about it. He came down with a sack, unhooked the rope from the lowest limb and coiled it over his shoulder like a man bringing home a catch. We hung the seat from the beam in our barn that night. Sometimes I still go out after dark, sit with my feet off the boards and look for the hens, though I have never once found Uncle Ned up there, only the hens.