Black ink line drawing of a bare-branched tree with leaves whose trunk forms a double helix and whose roots spread at the base, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree growing as a DNA double helix

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing of a tree whose branching crown sits above a twisting double helix trunk, with leaves and small vines wrapped along the strands. Roots spread out at the base, and a few loose leaves and seeds drift around the figure. The work uses fine, dense pen linework and hatching on a plain white background, with no colour.

Botanical Tree Branches Leaves Root Vine Seed

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

You will want to sit down for this, because the lane has never once been straight, and the hawthorn at the top of Coldharbour Lane has been growing sideways since before my mother was born. Mr Ashdown kept bees on the far side of it. He used to say the tree was keeping a ledger, and every spring it added a line. I thought he was joking until the spring the church roof came down, when the old elm by the stile split clean along its grain and inside it, Ashdown swore, there were rings going the wrong way, twisting like a barber's pole.

Keep reading

So I went looking, with a trowel and a jam jar, the way I do. Under the hawthorn's roots I found the stones that had been pushed up in a ring, and between them a tangle of pale fibres thin as cotton, running down into the dark like two ropes that had decided to braid themselves. Every seed I pried loose had a pair of tiny rooted threads, one winding left, one winding right, and where they crossed they always crossed in the same places, like a text that had been copied out by a careful hand and then lost its margins.

I took a jar of them home and set them on the windowsill. By Michaelmas the seedlings had climbed the glass and knotted themselves into a spiral no wider than my thumb, leaves budding out of the joins. Ashdown came round to look, bent double over the sill with his spectacles steamed up, and he said nothing for a long while. Then he pointed at the topmost leaf, which had already opened a fraction more than the rest, and said, that one's the newest line, and it's still being written.