Fine line botanical design of a tree whose trunk becomes a DNA double helix, with roots, leaves and butterflies, drawn in maroon ink on a peach background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree growing from a DNA helix

Fine line · Colour · Flash

A detailed drawing of a leafy tree whose trunk forms a twisting DNA double helix, with a spreading canopy above and roots spreading out below. Small leaves, twigs, butterflies and drifting petals are scattered around the helix. The fine, even linework is drawn in a single maroon ink on a flat peach background.

Fine line Botanical Tree Root Leaves Butterfly Branches Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Margit, the cuttings you asked for are wrapped in wet newspaper and riding in the glovebox, so mind the bend past the quarry. I should have written sooner, but the orchard has been eating my evenings. You remember the old pear by the chapel wall, the one with the split trunk your father swore was dead. Well, I took a graft from its lowest limb in March and grew it on in a pot under the kitchen window, and last week it sent out a second shoot that doubled back on itself, twisting around the first like two people who cannot agree on a direction. I cut them apart and they grew back together. I have stopped trying.

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I took the pair of them out to the field where we used to dig for worms and showed Tomasz, the boy from the farm, who pulled a face and said it looked like a staircase. He is not wrong. Each turn of the wood carries a rung of bark, and I have counted the rungs twice now and got different numbers both times, which is the sort of thing I would once have scolded a student for.

The roots are what worry me. I dug down beside the old wall to check how the original tree was anchored, and the fibres spread out in a flat fan under the clay, thinner than hair, branching and branching until I lost them. Nothing so tidy as a single root. I left the spade in the ground and walked home.

Come and see it before the frost, and bring your sketchbook. I want someone with better hands than mine to tell me whether it is a tree that has learned to be a code, or the other way round. Yours, Ilse.