Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman's profile in a tree on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's face in profile is drawn in black linework, with her hair flowing into tree branches, leaves and small dotted circles. Lower down, a snake-like form and flower shapes sit among the roots and foliage. The shading is achieved through fine outlines and dot fills, with no colour ink, and the design spreads across the upper arm and shoulder.

Botanical Fine line Upper arm Woman Profile Tree Branches Leaves Flower Snake Hair Dot

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The veil was due at the church by Friday and I still had the left side of the face to finish. Nell had sat for me twice in the back kitchen, chin up, pretending not to mind the lamp, and I had drawn her profile in pencil on the linen before I ever touched thread. The hair was the hard part. I wanted it to lift and spread the way it does in a breeze, then split into branches, so that every strand became a twig and every twig carried a little dot of seed.

Keep reading

My father's orchard at Dunmere had a crooked pear that the village children climbed. Nell's mother used to say that tree had been planted the year she was born, and that it knew all of our secrets because it had been listening from the garden wall. I put a spiral of green silk down the trunk for the snake, the kind that lives in the roots and comes up in autumn to see what's ripening. Nell said that was ridiculous and asked me to make it bigger.

On the Thursday night the thread ran out in the middle of a leaf. I went to the drawer where I keep the old reels and found a card of pale grey I had bought for a christening gown that never got made. I stitched the last of the branches with it, working until my eyes stung, and when I pulled the veil straight across the table the profile looked up at me, quite calm, the dots catching the lamplight like rain on a wire.

Nell wore it on Saturday. In the porch, with the bells going and her father fussing with his collar, she turned to me and asked whether the snake would show. I told her it would not, not from the aisle. Only someone standing close would find it, low down, where the roots tangle with the flowers. "Good," she said. "Then it's mine to know about."