Black and grey bare tree tattoo with fine line branches and stippled dotwork shading on the trunk and roots, across the upper back below the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree tattoo across the upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large bare tree fills the upper back, with its crown spreading almost to both shoulders and its roots fanning out at the base. The branches are drawn in fine, tapering black linework, while the trunk and roots are shaded with dense stippled dots that give them texture and depth. The image is in black and grey and is framed closely on the skin, with the neck at the top edge.

Botanical Dotwork Fine line Back Tree Branches Root Bare tree Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The oak on the green had lost its leaves a fortnight before my father died, and I still counted its branches every morning while the first batch proved. Thirty-one main limbs if you started at the church wall and went round, though the wind changed the number some days, snapping a twig here or adding a bough that had been hiding behind the others.

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Dorothy from the post office came in at half five for her usual split tin, and she asked what I was staring at. I told her the tree had two more branches than yesterday. She laughed and said I was getting soft, that trees don't change in a night. But the roots had been working under the pavement, lifting the flags outside the chemist, and the council had sent a man with a clipboard who stood under the trunk with his palm flat against the bark for a long time before he wrote anything down.

By six the bread was out, the crusts cracking as they cooled, and the sky over the rooftops had gone the colour of weak tea. I carried the last tray across to the bench beneath the oak and set a cob on the cold slats, the way my grandmother used to leave crumbs for the sparrows. Someone had tied a strip of red ribbon to the lowest branch overnight. I didn't know who. I left the bread there anyway.

When I came back out at seven the cob was gone, the ribbon knotted tighter, and the roots had pushed a fresh ridge under the bench so it leaned like a boat in a swell. I stood there with flour to my elbows and the green quiet around me, and I decided the council man could write whatever he liked. The tree had already chosen where it was going to stand.