Three people seen from behind in a kitchen, each with a small black line tree tattoo on the upper back, one with a small bird in the branches.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree tattoos on shoulder blades

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Three people stand with their backs to the camera in a kitchen, and each has a small bare tree tattoo on the upper back or shoulder blade. The trees are drawn in thin black linework with sparse branches, and one tree has a tiny bird in its branches. The image is in colour photography, but the tattoos are black ink on a simple composition, with the subjects filling the frame.

Fine line Botanical Shoulder Back Tree Branches Bird Couple

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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

Brother Anselm had planted the orchard twelve winters before I came to the house, and by the time I was given the spade it had outlived two abbots and a flood. Every February the old men walked the rows with their hoods up, touching the bark as if checking a horse's flank. I was told not to climb anything. I climbed the ash by the wall anyway, because a sparrow had built in it and I wanted to see its eggs.

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The bird was gone by the time I reached the fork. Only the nest was left, a cup of grass and wool, and I stayed up there longer than I should have, watching the cloister roof steam in the thin sun. Below, Brother Anselm stood with his arms folded, not scolding, just waiting, the way he waited for bread to rise.

When I came down he gave me a knife and a strip of waxed cloth. He showed me how to split the stock and bind the cut so the sap could not run out. 'The tree does not need to be whole to live,' he said. 'It needs to be joined.'

I grafted eleven stems that week. Four took. In April a single green bud opened on the pear in the north corner, and the brothers gathered to look at it as though it were a relic. I did not tell them that I had kept the sparrow's wool in my sleeve all winter, or that I had thought, climbing down, of the empty cup and how neatly it had been made.