Black and grey family tree tattoo with swirling leaves, script lettering and roots on the side of the ribs.

Family tree with roots and script lettering on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A family tree with ornate swirling branches and leaves rises from a root system at the base of the design. Script lettering forming the word Family sits beneath the roots, with a smaller line of script below it. Fine black linework and soft grey shading give the tree depth, and the design is composed vertically along the side of the torso.

Lettering Botanical Ribs Root Leaves Swirl Script Lettering Quote Letter

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 lorry had left Ferncombe at six, and by the time Nell reached the bottom of the lane the mist was still lying in the hollow where the old oak stood. Dad had planted that oak the year she was born, so he said, though Mum always claimed it was a sapling he'd nicked from the vicar. Nell stood under it with the letter in one hand and her boots soaking through, reading the same line again. Gran's handwriting slanted like a row of fence posts. Come home before the roots go, it said, and nothing else.

Keep reading

She had not been back in four years. The farm was smaller than she remembered, the barn roof patched with corrugated sheets that didn't match. Inside the kitchen, her brother Tom was scraping porridge from a pan, and he did not turn around when the door opened. He just said, "She's in the front room with the box," the way you'd mention the weather. Nell went through. On the floor lay a shoebox full of photographs and a tangle of old Christmas ribbon, and her grandmother was sorting them into piles by who had died first.

Nell picked up a snapshot of the oak in summer, its branches wrapped in a hundred green hands, and a smaller pile beside it of people's names written in pencil on the backs. Gran looked up over her glasses. "Your grandad tied his first kite to that tree," she said. "You can have the branch that snapped. I kept it." She pushed a dry stick across the rug. It was thin and grey, and someone had carved a small N into the bark. Nell turned it over in her fingers, and for once she had nothing clever to say.