Stippled black and grey tattoo design of a skull formed from a twisted tree, with a forest scene inside a circle, two birds and scattered orange leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull made of a tree with forest and birds

Dotwork · Mixed · Flash

A drawing of a skull whose jaw and features are formed from twisting tree trunks and roots, with a circular forest scene in black and grey set into the cranium. A deer stands in the forest, a bird perches on the left side, another small bird sits at the base of the tree, and orange leaves drift around the composition on a cream background. The shading is built from fine stippled dots and crisp linework, giving the skull a textured, engraved look.

Dotwork Botanical Skull Tree Forest Deer Bird Leaves Root

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

The last deer came down the ridge road on the third morning of the thaw, and Pell had to stop the cart to let it pass. I am writing this in the margin of the seed ledger because the good paper ran out in spring, and I cannot waste what is left on sentences that do not count.

Keep reading

The ash on the north slope has taken, Ruth. Eleven of the forty grafts are green at the tips, and the rooks came back to the hollow oak on the first warm day as if they had never been gone. Mr Okonedo says the bark on the old roots is splitting at the base, which means the sap is moving, which means we should cut before the frost gets under it. I told him we would take the dead elm by the gate first, because it stands where the valley light reaches it at noon, and a tree that has lost its light should not be left to lean over the path.

Don't tell the council about the orange leaves. The seedlings from the coast stock turn red at the edges in autumn, a colour nobody in the north remembers, and the children have started pressing them between the pages of the almanac. I let them. Somebody should know what the trees were supposed to look like before the blight took the rest.

Keep the jar of acorns on the sill. I will be back before the last frost, with the cart and the deer, if it stays near the wall. If you find a small grey bird sitting on the stump by the gate when you come up the hill, do not shoo it. It has come every morning since the thaw and waits for me there, which is more than I can say for the council.