Black line drawing of an elven tree of life with swirling branches and small stars, set inside an ornate circular frame.

Elven tree of life design in a circle

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of a stylised tree of life with curling, scroll-like branches, a central trunk and small star shapes beside the crown. The tree sits inside a circle decorated with swirls and a pointed finial at the top and bottom. The image is a plain black linework design on a white background with no shading or colour.

Botanical Tree of life Tree Circle Swirl Scroll Star Branches Leaves Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rim iron had cooled crooked again, and Mair Tennant swore at it in Welsh, then in English, then in the flat tongue her father used for horses. Three times that week the iron had sprung out of true on the anvil, and three times she had heated it back to orange and begun again. The customer, a drover named Hugh Pender, wanted his cart wheel by Friday, and he had made it plain that a wheel with a crook in it was no good to a man crossing the Brecon hills.

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On the Thursday night she gave up on straightness. She sat by the forge with a stub of chalk and drew instead what her grandmother had told her about the old elm in the churchyard at Llanwrtyd, whose roots were said to hold the parish together: a trunk rising through the middle of a ring, branches curling back on themselves like fiddleheads, and small star-shaped seeds dropping into the grass below. She traced the shape onto the back of the wheel pattern and found the curls fitted the bends of the iron as if the iron had been waiting for them.

She set the rim in the jig and bent it scroll by scroll, and when she lifted it out it lay flat as a plate, the pointed finial at the top catching the lamplight like a bird's beak. Hugh Pender came on Friday, ran his thumb round the inside of the rim, and found nothing to complain of except the swirls, which he said were fancy for a cart.

Mair said nothing. She took his coin and watched the wheel rattle off up the lane. Years later, when the old elm had long since gone to firewood, a boy from the valley would point at a wheel leaning against a barn wall and tell his mother the tree on it was the one by the church, and nobody would argue with him.