Black and grey botanical tattoo of a cross formed by a leafy tree trunk and branches, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree cross tattoo on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo across the upper back shows a cross whose upright and crossbar are formed by a tree trunk and branches, with small leaves along each limb. The trunk is shaded with soft grey tones and dense stippled texture, while the leaves are outlined in darker black ink. The design is set against a plain skin background, and the photo is taken from behind and slightly above.

Botanical Back Cross Tree Branches Leaves Trunk

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

Mind the step, it's loose, same as it always was. You want the ash at Mullins Gate, do you? I'll give you the good version first, because my mother gave it to me that way and I've never seen the sense in changing it.

Keep reading

Old Tom Garrow planted a whip of ash on the boundary the spring his wife went under the frost. Nobody told him to. He pushed it into the wet clay with his thumb and said it would have to be a cross, since that was the only shape his hands knew. The wind came off the Malverns that year like a knife and bent the sapling nearly double. He tied it to a stake with binder twine and cursed it every morning. Still it grew, and where the trunk split, it split again, one limb going left and one going right, as if it could not decide between going home and going on.

By the time the boys were grown, the crossbar had leaves so thick the sheep stood under it in July. People walked the lane just to look. Tom sat beneath it with a flask of cold tea, counting the birds, and he never once called it a sign of anything. He said it was a tree, and it was his, and that was enough.

When the council man came with a saw for the new road, Tom's granddaughter Eleanor stood in front of it with her arms folded. Keep it, she said, we'll be needing the shade. He didn't argue. Nobody argues with a Garrow in a lane with her arms folded, and the ash is still there, lopsided and green, its crossbar pointing east towards the church.