Black and grey botanical tattoo of a bare tree with branching limbs and spreading roots covering a person's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree across a back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large tree with bare, twisting branches fills the upper back, with its trunk running down the spine and roots spreading across the lower back. The linework is fine and sketchy, with shading in the trunk and roots that gives the tree depth. The tattoo is in black and grey ink on pale skin, and the subject is photographed from behind with the head and face out of frame.

Botanical Back Tree Branches Root Bare tree

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

My father always said the old oak at the top of Harrow Lane was the first tree to grow after the flood, and that its roots went down so far they touched the drowned church. I did not believe him until the winter the frost came early and split the bark along the north side. I went up with my axe on my shoulder and my mother's wool scarf wrapped twice round my neck, meaning to take three good logs before the snow closed the lane. The tree was bare as a bone clock, every branch picked clean, and yet when I laid my palm on the trunk it was warm, the way a sleeping dog is warm.

Keep reading

I did not cut it. Instead I sat in its roots, which rose out of the mud like the knuckles of a great hand, and I listened. Down under the frost I could hear a bell, very faint, the one the villagers swore had gone under the water in my grandmother's time. The sound seemed to come up through the wood and into my spine, and I felt every branch of that oak reach outward through me, fine as hair, grey as ash, looking for the sky.

When I came down the lane at dusk the other woodcutters asked where my logs were. I said the oak had given me something better, though I could not have told them what. My wife says I have been stooped and quiet ever since, rubbing my back against the doorframe like a bear. I have never once gone up the lane with the axe since. The wood keeps its own counsel, and so, these days, do I.