Black ink drawing of a gnarled tree with twisted branches and roots, shown as a tattoo design on plain white paper.

Gnarled tree with exposed roots

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A gnarled tree with twisting branches above and tangled roots below, centred on a plain white background. The linework is fine and scratchy, with dense stippled shading on the trunk, knot and roots. The image is entirely black ink on white paper.

Botanical Tree Root Branches Knot Trunk

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 stile where the path bends, for that's where the old oak stood before the colliery men came up the valley with their ropes and their money. My grandmother told me it had a face in its trunk, a knot the size of a fist with a hollow beneath it, and that the miners would touch it on their way down the shaft for luck. Nobody touched it the year the Ashworth pit flooded. Nobody could bear to.

Keep reading

But the roots went on working underground, the way roots do, feeling their way through the seams and the old workings where the men had cut the coal out from under them. Thirty-one men were below when the water came through the east face. The rescue crews dug at the wrong side of the hill for three days because the surveyor's plan had the old gallery drawn in the wrong place. Old Tom Pryce, who had carved his initials into that oak as a boy, stood at the pithead and said the tree knew the way. They laughed at him. He went down anyway, following the roots by the cold draught that came off them, and he came back up with eleven men holding onto his coat.

When they cut the stump out in the spring, they found a hollow the shape of a lantern, and inside it a child's iron whistle nobody remembered losing. They hung it above the lamp-room door. Miners still touch the knot on their way down, and I would not be surprised if the tree still feels them coming.