Black blackwork tattoo of a bare tree on a person's upper back, its trunk running down the spine with vertebra-like segments and branches spreading over the shoulder blade.

Bare tree with spine trunk across a back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large black tattoo of a leafless tree covers the upper and mid back, with its trunk following the line of the spine and its segments resembling vertebrae. The branches are drawn in fine, tapering lines that spread across the left shoulder blade, while the trunk is bolder and solid, with roots fanning out near the base. The image is in black ink only, photographed straight on with the head cropped out of frame.

Blackwork Botanical Back Tree Branches Spine Root Bare tree

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 ash at the top of Hollin Row had been bare since the winter the pit closed, and Nan said it had given up the same week the men did. Walter Hesketh did not believe in giving up on trees. Every Sunday he climbed the cinder track with a flask of stewed tea and a sketchbook, sat in the crook of the old roots, and drew the branches against the grey sky until the light went.

Keep reading

His grandson Col thought it was morbid. "It's a stick, Grandad," he said, kicking at the spoil heap. But Walter had noticed what the men at the club never bothered to look at. Where the trunk met the ground, the roots did not dive into soil. They ran down through the rubble into the old workings, cracking the seam like pale wire, and the pit ponies used to tie up in their shade because the ground stayed cool there, even in August.

In March the council came with a letter and a chainsaw. Walter stood in front of the trunk with his arms out, the way he had at the colliery gate in 1984, and the surveyor, who had been a lad on the same stairs, looked a long time at the ground beneath the tree. Then he folded the plan in half and said the shaft line had been drawn wrong for forty years, and the ash could stay where it was.

That night Walter inked the tree onto the back of the letter, every fork and knot, the trunk built from stacked rings like pit props waiting for winter. By April the buds came through on the thinnest twigs, and Col, who had called it a stick, climbed up first to see them.