Colourful swirling tree tattoo with a magenta trunk, black outlines and multicoloured spirals across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swirling tree across upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A stylised tree fills the centre of the back, with a thick magenta trunk, spiralling black-outlined branches and roots curling at the base. Scattered spirals and dots in green, blue, pink and orange surround the canopy, with shading on the trunk and branches. The composition is symmetrical and centred, with the tattoo covering most of the frame.

Back Tree Swirl Spiral Root Branches Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sycamore at the back of Seaspray House had been growing through the yard wall for longer than anyone could say, and by August its roots had lifted three flagstones and split the coal bunker in two. Mrs Abernethy wanted it felled. Her lodgers wanted it left alone, mostly because it was the only shade on the terrace where the wind did not reach, and because Tomasz, the cook's boy, had hung glass floats in its branches the summer before and nobody had the heart to take them down.

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Ruth found the old ledger in the scullery drawer, the one with the first owner's name inked on the flyleaf. Between the laundry lists, someone had sketched the tree in pencil: a thick trunk, branches curling back on themselves like the tops of ferns, and little rings and dots scattered around the canopy as if the wind had been carrying seeds. Beneath it, in a careful hand, was written: plant it where the sea cannot reach. Ruth read the line twice, then went out to look at the roots.

They came out of the bank beneath the wall and ran down towards the shingle, black and knotted, splitting at the tide line into a hundred fine threads that curled into the pebbles. A crab had made a home in one loop. Ruth knelt and traced the nearest curl with a finger, and felt under the grit something that might have been the start of a spiral.

She fetched a trowel. By supper the flagstones were back in place, the bunker propped with timber, and Mrs Abernethy had stopped talking about the axe. Nobody mentioned the ledger. The next morning, though, the glass floats had all been moved down into the lowest roots, where the spray could reach them, and the sycamore's leaves had turned gold at the edges, as if it had decided to keep something of the sea.