Black and grey tree tattoo with spreading roots and branches over a woman's back, with a geometric lattice design on the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree and geometric design across a back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her head turned away and her hair falling over one shoulder shows her bare back, which carries a large tree tattoo. The branches and roots spread upwards across the shoulders and down the spine, drawn with fine hatched linework and stippled shading. A dense, symmetrical geometric pattern sits at the base of the back, and the dark brown background gives the piece strong contrast.

Botanical Geometric Fine line Back Tree Root Branches Geometric pattern Lattice Back Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, the fire won't carry my voice past the refectory door, and Brother Anselm has already dozed off twice. No, the tree was never planted. It rose out of the ground where the first abbot buried a miller's dog, and by the time the walls went up its roots had found their way under the cloister. The brothers laid their slate lattice over the top to keep the floods out, and the roots simply climbed through the gaps and kept going.

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Every winter the tree grew one new branch for each novice who kept silence a full year. Brother Wendel counted them with a piece of chalk on the chapter house wall, three hundred and eleven of them by the time he died, though the bell-ringer swore there were more he had not bothered to count, and that some had crossed the river into the next parish.

Then came the wet spring when the lattice cracked. A novice named Edith took a lamp down into the cellar to find the break and followed the roots instead, because they glowed faintly wherever they touched the cold stone. They led her to a dry room lined with wooden tallies, hundreds of them, each cut with a name and a date. Every one belonged to a brother who had walked out of the gate and never come back.

She found a blank tally at the end of the row and cut her own name into it with the knife she used for the bread. The next morning the tree had a new branch, bare and pale, bent towards the gate. Brother Wendel swore that by evening it carried a leaf. I have never seen the leaf myself, mind, but I have seen the gate left open, and that is the sort of thing a tree can teach a person.