Black and grey botanical tattoo of a swirling tree with three birds, across the upper back and shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swirling tree with birds on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo of a tree with curling, scroll-like branches and roots spreads across the upper back. Three small bird silhouettes sit among the upper branches. The solid black trunk and swirls are shaded with soft grey gradients, and the composition is centred on the spine and shoulder blade.

Botanical Back Shoulder Tree Bird Swirl Branches Root

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mott had carved forty-one horses for the Harrowgate fair before the old showman asked him for something that wasn't a horse. "Give me a tree," Dolly Vane said, tapping the canvas of the dodgems with her boot. "Something that'll outlast the lot of us." Mott didn't ask why. He carried the lime wood out to the field behind the generator wagon, where the rain had turned the grass to grease.

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He worked by lamplight for nine nights. The trunk came first, black as creosote, and then the branches, which he cut not as limbs but as curls, scrolls that unwound the way bracken does in April. Dolly brought him sweet tea in a dented flask and watched him wash the swirls with ash and soot, thinning the grey with linseed until it looked like smoke caught on the wood. The three birds he left until last. They were no bigger than thumbs, cut from offcuts, and he pinned them among the top branches so they seemed to have landed a moment before.

On the tenth morning the fair packed up early, the wind coming off the moor with sleet in it. Mott lashed the tree to the back of the lorry, roots bound in sacking, and they drove south without stopping. Dolly never said where they were going. At the coast road she made him pull over, climbed down, and stood a long time with her palm flat against the trunk.

When she got back in, she said the birds had only been waiting for the wind to change. Mott turned in his seat. The tree was knocking against its ropes, and the three birds were gone, leaving three small pinholes in the lime wood, pale as the sleet that had started falling again.