Two people shown from behind with matching black botanical tattoos of a heart-shaped tree with swirling branches and roots on the upper back.

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Matching heart tree tattoos on two backs

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two women stand side by side with their backs to the camera, each with an identical black tattoo of a tree whose trunk forms a heart shape. Fine curling branches with small leaves spread across the upper back, and the roots loop out below the heart. The solid black ink contrasts with the skin, and the matching designs sit at a similar height on each back against a plain indoor background.

Botanical Back Tree Heart Branches Leaves Root Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The graft took on the third try, Maeve, though you'd never know it now. The two saplings we carried up from the lower terraces were stubborn, one from the seed bank in Wardle and one that Oskar dug out of the wall of the old ferry shed, and they fought each other all through the first winter. By spring the stems had found a way to lean together, and the trunk split just above the soil and rejoined itself in a loop no gardener in the Hollow would have chosen. Oskar said it looked like a heart somebody had drawn with a wet thumb.

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The trick, he told me, was to stop pruning the join. Every other branch we cut back hard, because the orchard council wanted fruit by the solstice and nothing else, but the place where the two trunks met we left alone. The roots came out of the earth in tight curls that looped over the old drainage pipe, and last month they lifted the cracked flag by the well. Nobody has complained. The council sent a surveyor who stood under it with his hands in his pockets and then walked away without writing anything down.

I will send you a cutting when the sap runs in the new year, and you can take it south to the terraces where the sun comes in sideways. Wrap it in damp sacking and keep the wind off it on the descent. Tell whoever keeps the grafting shed that the heart goes up, the roots go down, and the leaves are for anyone who needs shade in the afternoons.

Oskar is asleep under it now, boots off and hat over his face. The branches make a lattice against the sky, and the light comes through in little coins that shift when the wind does. I think it will outlast the both of us, which is what he wanted. Come home before the frost, love. The tree has kept the gap open for you.