Black ink flash design of a bare tree with stippled trunk and roots, with birds perched on the branches and flying above, shown on a plain light background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree with birds and roots

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bare tree with a wide, spreading crown of branches stands on a stippled trunk that widens into exposed roots at the base. Small black birds perch along the branches and fly in a loose group above the canopy. The drawing uses fine ink linework for the branches and dense dotwork shading on the trunk and roots, set in black and grey on a plain, light background.

Dotwork Botanical Tree Bird Root Branches Flock Trunk

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 flour was still settling in the air when Marta lifted the first tray of loaves from the oven, and the crows came down the lane the way they always did, one at a time and then all at once. Her uncle had kept the bakery on Tanner Row for forty years and had never once thrown them anything, saying a crow fed was a crow that stayed. So she only watched them land on the wall, black as the shadows of the gas lamps, and counted them like the takings.

Keep reading

The yard behind the shop had a sycamore nobody would cut down. It had been dead since the winter the river flooded, its branches gone grey and spread wide over the bins and the washing line. Her uncle used to say the roots had gone down further than the tree had ever grown up, that it was holding the whole lane together from underneath. Marta had never believed him until the morning the cellar wall cracked and the water came in, and it was the old roots that pushed back.

This morning the crows had gathered in the branches, dozens of them, perched like punctuation along every limb. When the first light touched the chimneys they rose together and wheeled once above the roofs, then settled back exactly where they had been. Marta slid the last loaf onto the rack, wiped her hands on her apron, and went out to the yard with a heel of bread in her palm.

She didn't throw it. She set it on the bottom step of the stairs to the cellar, where the roots came up through the stone, and went back inside to start the kettle.