Brown line drawing of a tree with ornate swirling foliage, flowers and a dragonfly above long, curling roots, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swirling tree with spreading roots

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A stylised tree fills the frame, its crown built from ornamental scrolls, leaves, rosettes and small flowers, with a dragonfly near the top left. The trunk splits into long, tapering roots that curl outward and downward across the lower half. The artwork is a single brown tone on a plain white background, with solid trunk and root shapes contrasted against fine decorative linework in the canopy.

Botanical Tree Root Swirl Leaves Flower Dragonfly Tree of life

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 officer at Pinmoor lifted the sapling from the inspection tray and turned the pot slowly, as though it might confess something. Marta had carried it on her knees for nine hours, the root ball wrapped in newspaper gone soft with rain, a plastic bag punctured twice so it could breathe. "Plant material," he said, not unkindly. "And soil."

Keep reading

She had the form already, folded inside her coat, stamped in two colours and signed by a woman in Lisbon who had laughed at the request. The cutting had come from beneath her grandmother's garden wall, a hawthorn that had pushed through the mortar the summer the old man next door died. Its roots had spread across the bottom of the pot like the lines on a palm, reaching in every direction at once, as if it had only just noticed the earth was there.

He tipped the pot toward the lamp and studied the pale threads running down through the dark soil. "What's it for, then?" Marta said it had to be in the ground before the thaw, or it would forget how to be a tree. He read the form twice, then looked at the sapling for a long time. A dragonfly had ridden the coach window beside her for three hundred miles, and she thought of that now, the way it had kept pace and never once landed.

He stamped the paper and slid it back across the counter. Outside, the car park lights were coming on one by one. Marta carried the pot out level in both hands, careful not to tip it, the roots at the bottom still curling against the plastic as though they meant to find their own way down.