Black and grey botanical tattoo of a bare tree with roots across a person's back, with script lettering running beside the spine and down the side.

Bare tree with roots across a back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large bare tree with twisting branches and exposed roots covers most of the back, with the trunk running down the spine. The linework is fine and detailed, with shading in the bark and roots, and the ink is a dark blue-black with no colour. Two lines of script lettering sit beside the tree, one curving around the lower back and one running vertically along the right side.

Botanical Lettering Back Tree Branches Root Trunk Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The oak at the back of the winter quarters had lost its leaves the week the last of the horses were sold. My uncle Ray used to say you could tell a dying show by its trees: they stop being trimmed. Ours had stopped years ago, and the big top sagged over the rigging like a wet tent on a bad morning.

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I was fourteen when Ray taught me the bowline. Rabbit out of the hole, round the tree, back down the hole. He tied one round the lowest limb so I could hang off it without falling. "A knot's only as good as the man checking it," he said, then he checked mine, and I cried because it was the first thing anyone had ever trusted me with.

Now the company was down to four wagons, a clown who drank, and me, and the lines to the high trapeze had perished. I climbed the oak in November with a coil of new manila over my shoulder. The roots had heaved up out of the frozen mud like knuckles, and I found Ray's old bowline still there, gone grey and hard as a stone.

I didn't cut it. I rigged the new line beside it, tied the bowline the way he'd shown me, and called the clown up to test it. He swung out over the mud shouting something about the wind, and the old knot held. In spring we'd take the big top down for the last time and haul it off the sodden field toward the coast, if you can call that sailing. Ray would have called the idea daft. He'd have been right, and he'd have come along anyway.