Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a skull formed from a bare, twisted tree across a person's upper back, with roots spreading below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull formed by a bare tree on a back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo covers most of the back, showing a skull whose eye sockets and nasal cavity are formed by the trunk and branches of a gnarled, leafless tree. The linework is fine and the shading is built from stippled dots, giving the bark and skull a textured, weathered look. The ink is black and grey with a soft reddish flush in the surrounding skin, and the design is centred on the spine with the roots fanning out toward the lower back.

Dotwork Back Skull Tree Branches Root Bark

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the hill kingdom of Hollin Ayre, the old oak above the reservoir had died the winter the miller's son drowned, and nobody would cut it down. Ivo Penrack, the sexton's apprentice, was sent up with a saw and a sack of lime to finish what the frost had started. He found the trunk grey and pitted, the crown split, and two hollows in the wood where the branches had drawn apart as if something inside had pushed them.

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The old women of the lower village said the tree had been the kingdom's first sexton, who buried the dead too greedily and was made to keep them. Ivo did not believe it. He believed in the saw. But when he set the blade to the root flare, the dust that came off the cut was pale and fine as bone meal, and it settled on the back of his hand and would not wipe away.

That night he sat at the kitchen table counting lime against the graves due before spring, and the numbers would not come out even. Every sum he tried ended with one more name than the parish had written down, and the name was always his own.

At first light he climbed back up. The tree stood as it had, skull-faced and patient, its roots combed out over the frozen ground like fingers spread on a table. He did not lift the saw. He carried the sack down to the chapel and told the priest the lime was spent. "Let the oak keep its own count," he said, and the priest, who had never once asked him to explain himself, wrote nothing down.