Black and grey drawing of a symmetrical tree with braided knotwork trunk, swirling branches and twisting roots, shown as a tattoo design.

Braided tree with swirling branches and roots

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical tree is drawn with a braided, knotted trunk that splits into looping roots at the base. Thin and thick branches curl outwards into spirals and loops across the top of the design. The shading uses fine hatched lines and solid black strokes on a plain white background, giving the strands a rounded, three-dimensional look.

Tree Root Branches Braid Knot Swirl Spiral

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

Shift over and mind the tiller, the water's sulking today. You want to know about the ash at Thornbury Lock? Everyone on this cut knows the tree, though few tell it right. My grandmother always said it began as two saplings that wouldn't let go of each other. A lock-keeper's boy planted them the spring the new cut was dug, a hazel with a crooked back and a willow that never kept still, and he tied their stems together with tarred twine so they'd grow straight. The twine rotted away within a year. They kept growing anyway, wound round each other like a pair of old lovers who'd forgotten how to part.

Keep reading

The years went on. Coal barges came through the gates, then pleasure hire boats with children hanging off the bows. Every winter the flood rose over the towpath and the trunk stood in it to the knees, and every winter the roots pushed further under the bank, looping down into the silt as if they were feeling for something. Hettie Crane, who kept the lock cottage for forty years, swore she heard them knocking under the stonework on still nights. She said they were searching for the keeper's brass ring, the one he'd dropped in the cut the day he marched off to the war and never came back to claim.

The summer I was twelve, a dead barge jammed the lower gate and I was sent down with a crowbar and a bucket. I wedged my boot against a root and felt something cold under the mud. It was the ring, gone green, knotted into the fibres as neatly as a sailor's hitch. I slipped it on my finger to see. It fitted perfectly, which frightened me more than anything. Hettie took it off me, turned it over once, and handed it back. 'Put it where it came from,' she said. So I did. The branches are still curling overhead, and if you sit on the bank at dusk you can hear the roots turning over in the mud, patient as a knot being tied again.