Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a tree inside a circle with radiating lines and a mandala at its base, on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree and mandala in a circle on upper back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black tree with a full canopy and a bare trunk sits inside a circle, with fine radiating lines behind it. Beneath the trunk, a dotted mandala or lotus-like ornament forms the roots. The work uses fine linework and stippled shading in black and grey, with a centred, symmetrical composition on the upper back.

Geometric Dotwork Botanical Back Tree Circle Mandala Lotus Sunburst Root Geometric line

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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

You find the tree the way you find most things in this city, by walking into it after the last bus has gone. Under the lamp on Carrow Square stands a plane tree older than the terraces around it, its canopy black against the orange sky. At its foot the council has laid a ring of iron grating, cast with lace-like petals that someone must once have thought worth the trouble. Tonight the metal is wet and the petals gleam.

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Mrs Adeyemi from number nine comes out in a dressing gown, carrying a folding chair and a flask. She says the tree went in the year her husband proposed, and that its roots have been lifting the pavement ever since, one slab at a time. The council keeps cutting them back and the roots keep coming. "It wants to go down, not up," she says. "Everything worth having goes down first." She pours you a cup. The tea tastes of tin and sugar, and you drink it anyway.

You sit together on the kerb while a night bus sighs past. She tells you that on clear nights, if you stand beneath the branches and look up, the streetlights ring the canopy and their rays fan outwards like someone drew a sun with a compass and a steady hand. You look. The rays are there, thin and exact, and the tree sits in the middle of them as though it were drawn first and the streets were built around the drawing.

When you stand, your knee cracks and the flask rolls off the kerb and lands in the grating, where the lotus pattern catches it and holds it still. Mrs Adeyemi laughs and says to leave it, the tree has been keeping stranger things. So you leave it. Walking home, you keep thinking about roots, and how they hold a thing in place by going deeper than anyone bothers to look.