Black and grey realism tattoo of a bare tree with roots and twisting branches across a man's ribs and side of the back.

Bare tree tattoo across ribs and back

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large bare tree with twisting branches and exposed roots covers the side of a torso, running from the lower ribs up towards the shoulder blade. The trunk and roots are rendered with dense hatching and soft grey shading, giving the bark a textured, weathered look, while the small leaf buds on the branches are outlined with fine linework. The tattoo is almost entirely grey and black with faint brownish tones, and the curved composition follows the body's shape.

Realism Botanical Ribs Back Tree Branches Root Bark Leaves Bud

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 sycamore had been growing through the old goods yard at Harrowfield since before the line was laid, and by the time I took over the signal box it had cracked the concrete of platform two and lifted the paving into little hills. Nobody wanted to cut it down. Mrs Pargeter in the ticket office said it was the only thing on the branch that had never once been late.

Keep reading

In March the buds came out before the leaves, tight and brown as sparrow eggs, and I started logging them the way I logged the points. Forty-one on the north side. Six on the one branch that bent back over the fence as if it was trying to read the timetable. Every morning I wrote the count in the book beside the train times, and every morning the count was higher, and I could not have told you why it mattered to me.

The line closed for resignalling in April. The engineers came with a digger and a man in a yellow vest who looked at the roots and said, without much interest, that the tree would come up with the platform. I asked for a day. He gave me until the Thursday.

On the Wednesday night I walked the length of the platform with a torch and counted what the tree had left. The buds had opened into leaves the colour of old pennies, and where the roots broke through the concrete, a dozen green shoots were already pushing up through the cracks. I wrote the number in the book. Then I shut the box and left the lamp burning in the window, for the tree, which was the only thing on the line that ever kept a proper watch.