Large colour tattoo across a person's upper back showing a leafy tree with birds in flight above an electric guitar wrapped in orange ribbons, on the Back.

Tree, birds and guitar across a back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo spans the back, with a bare tree rising from the centre and green leaves and flowers across its branches. A flock of birds flies across the upper left, and an electric guitar with orange scroll ribbons sits at the base. Black ink splatters and a soft red-pink wash surround the design, which is mostly coloured with some black shading.

Botanical Neo-trad Back Tree Leaves Flower Bird Guitar Ribbon Ink splatter

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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

Nobody on Corporation Row would sell Tomas a plank of seasoned wood that winter, so he went up to the sycamore behind the gasworks after dark. The starlings lifted off when he came with the saw, and went west over the chimney pots like a handful of thrown ink. He cut one low limb and carried it home on his shoulder through the sleeping streets, and the leaves on the cut end stayed green all the way.

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He carved the body from that wood in his mother's scullery, shaping the waist with a spokeshave and cutting the sound hole with a tin opener. For strings he took wire from the tram depot, and for a bridge he used a button his grandfather had sewn on a waistcoat no one had worn since the war. When he finally played it at the crossroads outside the Crown, the notes came out rough and bright, and people stopped under the gaslamps to listen. Someone left a heel of bread on the kerb. Someone else left a shilling.

All that spring he played, and the sycamore behind the gasworks grew bare, branch by branch, as if the tune had been drawn out of it. By April there was nothing left on the tree but twigs and the sooty grey of the bark. Tomas stopped carrying the guitar to the crossroads and sat on the cold step of the scullery with it across his knees.

In the morning he found the wood had leafed out over the cut, green as lime cordial, and the starlings were already back in the crown. The guitar was still in his lap, and when he touched a string, the sycamore answered with a rustle that carried all the way to the Crown.