Black and grey botanical tattoo of a bare tree with exposed roots and falling leaves, with a Celtic knot at the trunk, across the centre of a lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree with roots and falling leaves on a back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The design shows a bare tree with a thick, shaded trunk, spreading branches and roots that wrap across the bottom of the image. Scattered leaves drift through the branches, and a Celtic triquetra knot sits at the base of the trunk. The tattoo is rendered in soft grey shading with fine outlines and is centred across the lower back.

Botanical Back Tree Root Leaves Branches Triquetra Celtic knot

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

Dear Win,

Keep reading

The men came for the sycamore on Tuesday, two of them with a saw that sang like a kettle, and by dinnertime half the square was sawdust and the other half was standing about with its hands in its pockets. Mr Pryce from the council said the roots had got under the chapel wall. He was right about the roots. Nobody who has watched them lift the flags outside the Crown would argue with that.

Yet I went down with the tea in the flask, the way Dad used to take it out to the fence, and I stood by the stump while they worked. The leaves were still in the gutters, brown and curled like old envelopes. Ned Hughes picked one up and showed me the veins, how they all branched out from one thin stalk the way the tree had from its trunk, and then he dropped it in the barrow with the rest.

They'd left the roots. Those great grey knuckles going down into the clay, twisting round each other as if they were holding on. Someone had scratched three looping arcs into the bark on the underside of the largest one, each overlapping the next, with no beginning and no end. Ned said his grandfather had done it, back when the tree was a whip of a thing by the lych gate. I don't know what I believe about that. But I came home and wrote this instead of the list for the Co-op, because I thought you'd want to know the tree is still down there, holding on.

Love, Maud