Botanical tattoo of a double helix that grows into a tree with roots, with pink cherry blossoms, on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

DNA helix tree with cherry blossoms on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A double helix forms the trunk of a tree, with dark branches spreading upwards and roots spreading at the base. Pink cherry blossom petals and flowers surround the tree and drift down the helix. The black and grey linework and shading give the helix and tree depth, while the pink blossoms are softly washed in colour against bare skin on a leg resting on a black leather surface.

Botanical Calf Tree Root Cherry blossom Petal Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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Your father's cherry tree has finally done what he always said it would, and I thought you should hear it from me rather than from the council man, who wants it felled by Friday for the new drive. It flowered three weeks early this year, so every petal came down in the wind before the buyers could see it.

You remember how the trunk winds round on itself, two stems twisted like a banister, the bark ridged in rungs. Dad told everyone he grafted it that way on purpose, one limb from his mother's tree and one from the nursery stock his own father brought back from Kent, and that the roots would sort out the rest. I found his notebook in the shed under the sacks of bonemeal. Page after page of dates, and the word hold underlined so hard the pencil tore the paper.

I went out with a torch last night, and the blossom was coming down in rings along the twist, rung by rung, like someone climbing down a stair in the dark. I stood under it until my tea went cold. I cannot be the one who cuts it. I'm posting you the notebook and a cutting wrapped in damp newspaper. Plant it wherever you end up and let the roots decide what it becomes.

Love, Aunt Ruth

P.S. Hold, he wrote. I think he meant hold on, not hold back.