Two women seen from behind, each with a matching black botanical tattoo of a heart-shaped tree with swirling vine branches and roots on the upper back.

Matching heart-shaped tree tattoos on two backs

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two women are shown from behind, each with an identical black tattoo on the upper back between the shoulder blades. The design is a tree whose trunk and roots form an open heart, with curling vine branches, small leaves and tendrils spreading above it. The linework is solid black with no shading or colour, and the two tattoos sit side by side in the frame.

Botanical Back Tree Heart Root Vine Swirl Leaves Matching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The two sisters were given one seed between them by the miller's widow, who said it would grow only if both kept hold of it. They quarrelled about who should plant it, so they planted it together at the crossroads below Hallam Weir, one spade each, and the spades rang on the same stone until the hole was deep enough.

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The tree came up crooked and dark. Its roots went down into the wet clay in a loop, then split and parted and met again, so that when the sisters stood back they saw a heart standing on its point in the earth. Vines climbed out of the top of it and curled over the lane, and every curl had a leaf, and every leaf had a small bird sitting on its edge who would not fly away while anyone was looking.

For years they went to the tree whenever the mill ran dry or the winter was long. Tilly told it her troubles and Ada told it hers, and the vines took the words and wove them into new loops above the heart. Nobody else in the village could make sense of the tracery, but the sisters could read it like a letter.

When Ada went over the hill to marry, Tilly walked to the crossroads every morning and found the vines had grown a single extra curl on the side facing west. She never asked the tree what it meant. She simply pressed her palm against the roots, the way you would hold a hand, and went home to bake.