Black ink Celtic knotwork circle enclosing a tree of life, tattooed on the inner wrist of a raised hand.

Celtic tree of life on the inner wrist

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a tree enclosed in a circular Celtic knotwork border sits on the inner wrist. The tree has a full crown and visible roots, and the knotwork ring uses fine, interlaced lines with solid and open sections. The hand is raised against a blurred indoor background with pinkish floor, and the tattoo is the sharpest detail in the frame.

Botanical Geometric Other Tree of life Celtic knot Knotwork Circle Root

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rowan had been walking into Carrick Glen for three winters, and by the fourth the schoolchildren were leaving bread crusts at its roots so it would not come further up the lane. Old Maol Eoin said a tree that wanted the village was a tree that wanted something from it, and he would not cut it. He went up instead with a coil of copper wire, a pair of bone-handled pincers and a head full of his grandmother's knots.

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He worked nine nights, plaiting the wire into a ring as wide as a cartwheel, over and under, never letting a line end where another began. His grandmother had told him that a knot with an open end is a door, and he had no wish to leave one. Each time he stopped to rest, the rowan leaned a little nearer, its roots lifting out of the peat like the fingers of a hand feeling for a latch.

On the ninth night the tree spoke, in the voice of wind through a gap in a dry-stone wall. 'What is the ring for?' it asked. 'To keep you where you are,' said Maol Eoin. 'Then you must keep me fed as well,' said the tree, and it named its price. It wanted to be let go only as far as the wire allowed, and once in every year it wanted to be counted by name, by someone who would walk the whole circle with it. The old man agreed, and pressed the last loop shut with his thumb.

In the morning the lane was clear. The rowan stood inside its ring with a full crown, its roots drawn in as neat as stitches, and Maol Eoin's wife found the wire still whole in the frost. Every spring since, a child from the glen walks the circle and says the old man's name aloud, and the roots shift under the path like something turning over in its sleep.