Black ink drawing of a broad oak tree with stippled leaves and a full root system spreading beneath it, on a plain white background.

Oak tree with spreading roots, black ink design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A large oak tree with a wide, spreading canopy of branches and stippled leaves rises from a trunk that splits into a network of long, sweeping roots. The work is built from bold solid black linework and fine dot shading on the foliage, with no colour and no background. The tree is centred and symmetrical in composition, with the roots filling the lower half of the frame.

Botanical Blackwork Tree Root Leaves Branches Tree of life

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The oak at the top of Hobb's Field had been there before the parish had a name, and when the Pryce girl married the miller's son that autumn, the whole village walked up the lane to see the vows made beneath it. Her mother had said it was foolishness. Her grandmother had said nothing at all, only tied a length of red wool to the lowest branch and went home to bed.

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The bride was called Nell and she was not afraid of trees. She put her palm flat on the bark and said she could feel the water going up through it, slow as a clock. The groom laughed and said that was the cider talking. But when the priest asked them to join hands, Nell's fingers slipped and she reached down instead, and her hand closed on a root that had come up through the grass like a vein through an old wrist.

Nobody saw her pull it. They saw her stand up with her hand bleeding a little where the bark had caught her, and they saw the root drawing back into the earth like a cat going under a gate. The groom did not seem to mind. He said later that she had looked at the ground the way a person looks at a letter from far away.

They lived in the mill house for sixty years. Every spring the oak put out leaves a week before any other tree in the valley, and every spring Nell's grandchildren were given a thread of red wool and told to tie it where the roots came nearest the surface, so the tree would know whose hands had been given to it.