Two photographs of black tattoos on the upper back: a tree with roots on the left and a hatched swallow near the nape on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree and swallow tattoos on the upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The left panel shows a solid black tree with a textured, lined canopy and spreading roots, placed on the upper back below the short hair at the nape. The right panel shows a swallow in flight with a striped, hatched wing pattern, sitting at the base of the neck above a cream sweatshirt. Both images are black ink on skin with simple, plain compositions against neutral backgrounds.

Back Neck Tree Root Swallow Bird

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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

The cage was lowered at six, and you were already at the top of it, one boot on the rail, watching the wet headgear shine under the lamps. Your father had told you the pit took a man's name before it took his body, and you had thought he was being poetic. Below, the seam ran level for a mile under the Dunmere fields, held up by timber and by the blind faith of the old men who had cut it.

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The oak on the green above the chapel was the Lamp Oak, the men called it, planted the year the first shaft sank. Its roots had cracked the chapel wall and lifted the lych-gate path into steps. Your sister Mab used to say the roots went down to the seam and drank the coal, which was nonsense, but she said it with such conviction that you believed it for a whole winter.

The swallows came back to the headgear every April, cutting the grey sky above the winding wheel. One spring a single bird hung in the draught above the shaft and would not leave, dipping and wheeling while the banksman shouted at it to get out of the way. You watched it through the rain, and when the cage finally dropped, you could have sworn it was still up there, riding the dark beside you like a lamp that had decided to come along.

Mab got you out in the end, though not the way you expected. Eleven days later the east face came down, and you were on the surface only because you had swapped shifts with a boy who had a new baby. You never told her about the swallow. Some mornings now you walk out to the oak, lay your palm flat on the bark, and wait for the roots to hum under the frost.