Black and grey realism tattoo of a gnarled, twisting tree with bare branches running up the side of the ribs.

Gnarled tree on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo depicts a twisted, gnarled tree trunk with bare branches curling up the side of the torso, and roots spreading across the lower ribs. Soft blended shading and darker accents give the trunk a weathered, three-dimensional bark texture. The image is in black and grey, photographed from the side, with a hand holding a dark garment at the upper edge of the frame.

Realism Botanical Ribs Tree Branches Root Bark

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 oak had stood on the rise above Hollin Brook longer than the parish had a name for it, and by the spring the mill was built, its roots had cracked the cellar wall twice. Maud Tennant came up the lane with a bucket of whitewash and a grievance. The miller wanted the tree felled for the new wheel, and he had offered her a shilling a day to hold the rope while his men took the first cut.

Keep reading

She didn't take the shilling. She sat under the branches instead, her back against the trunk, and told the tree everything the miller had said about her mother's debts and her dead father's temper. The bark was warm where the sun had been on it, and it smelled of rain that had not yet fallen. When the men came up at dusk with their saws, they found her asleep with her cheek against a knot the size of a fist, and the saws stayed in their sacks.

The tree did not thank her. Trees do not. But in the morning a root had pushed up through the floor of the mill, neat as a hand reaching out of a grave, and the miller's boots found it in the dark and went flying. He bought his wheel from a man in Cressley instead. Maud kept the whitewash, painted her door blue, and every winter after that she left a dish of milk at the foot of the oak, where the twisted limbs went on reaching for a sky that never once asked them to stop.