Black stencil design of a gnarled, leafless tree with a skull in its trunk, shown on a white card against a dark green backdrop.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gnarled dead tree with skull stencil

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stencil design of a twisted, leafless tree with bare, forking branches. A skull is cut into the gnarled base of the trunk, and the rough, broken edges suggest bark and roots. The design is solid black on white with no grey shading, and the card sits in a dark frame against a green flame-style background.

Blackwork Tree Branches Skull Root Stencil

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

Mind the puddle by the fish stall, and sit close, for the rain's come in sideways and I'll not shout over it. You want the old elm on Carrow Hill? Aye, the one that's nothing now but sticks. It was the last thing standing green in the valley the year the blight came.

Keep reading

Its keeper was a widow called Ada Pelling, who sold eels from a barrow down here, same spot as my blanket. She'd climb the hill each dusk with a bucket of ash water and pour it round the roots, because her mother said ash water kept the dead quiet. Nobody thought the tree was dying. They thought it was waiting.

One November the wind stripped the last leaf and the trunk split open at the base. Inside, grinning out of the bark like a knot that had decided to be a face, was a skull no bigger than a walnut. Ada didn't scream. She knelt, wiped the grime from its brow with her apron, and said, Well, you've been holding on too. Then she fetched a spade and put the thing back where it lay. The tree never leafed again. It didn't need to. Its roots had found something older to drink from.

Folk say the branches still reach for the village at night, and if you hear them creaking on the hill, you owe the tree a bucket of ash water. I've never paid. Mind, I've never climbed it either. Now, who wants the one about the miller's wife and the eel?