Back tattoo of a dark grey tree with pink blossoms and red leaves trailing down the spine, in a botanical style on the back.

Blossom tree with falling leaves across a back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large tree with a dark grey trunk, roots and bare branches spreads across the upper back, with pink blossom clusters along the canopy. Red leaves drift down the spine and gather at the lower back, with some leaves rendered in fine detail and shading. The trunk uses grey shading for depth, while the blossoms and leaves are in red and pink against a plain skin background.

Botanical Back Tree Blossom Cherry blossom Leaves Trunk Root Branches

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 leaves came down the hill the way they always did, one by one at first, then in handfuls, until the whole path from the chapel to the mill lay red as a row of spilt coins. Old Marta Pell counted them from her step each dusk, because her son Ivo was out on the far side of the peat moss with the ewes, and the mist came up off the bog before the lanterns were lit.

Keep reading

On the night the fog came thick as wool, Ivo did not come back. Marta took a stick and a tin of tallow and went up the slope. At the foot of the old tree, where the roots humped out of the bank like the knuckles of a fist, the leaves had stopped. They lay in a drift against the bark, as high as her knee, and not one of them pointed anywhere.

She knelt and dug with her hands. The earth under the drift was warm, and the roots had grown around a hollow where a man could sit out of the wind. Ivo was there, his back against the trunk and his hands tucked in his coat. Pressed flat against his boot was a red leaf with a thread of his grey wool knotted through the stalk. She understood then that the tree had never been guiding anyone. It only gathered what the valley let go of and kept it warm until someone came looking.

Every autumn since, Marta has carried one leaf down to the mill and laid it on the sill. Every autumn the path is laid again, one red step at a time, as if the tree was only waiting to be asked.