Black and grey botanical tattoo of a tree of life inside a circle, with a sun on the left, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life and sun on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A tree with spreading branches and leaves fills a circle, with its roots curving down and back into the outline. A sunburst with a plain centre sits on the left, and the rest of the ring is picked out in fine dotted leaves. The design is shaded in soft grey with dark accents in the trunk and crown, and it sits on the side of the torso against pale skin.

Botanical Fine line Ribs Tree Tree of life Sun Circle Leaves Root Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mara dug the hole three times before the roots agreed to go down the way she wanted. Her father said a tree on that headland would be flattened by the first gale, and he was not wrong about the wind, but he had never seen the seed. It had come in the pocket of a drowned man's coat, a hard brown thing that rattled like a dice when she shook it. She kept it in a tin for a year before she had the nerve to try.

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She planted it inside the ring of stones her grandmother had laid to keep the sheep off the dunes. The first summer it put out only three leaves, and the village said it was a poor sort of luck. The second summer the branches climbed over the wall and leaned toward the lighthouse, as if they wanted a closer look at the lamp. The keeper at Scarrow Point sent a boy up the path to ask what she had done to his light.

Nothing, she told him. The tree had simply taken up the sun's old habit of waking the hill. Every dawn the disc came up low over the grey water and laid its rays across the roots, and every dusk the crown caught the last of it and held it until the stars were out.

The seed had been carried by a man who never reached shore. Mara thought of him when the wind came up off the sea and the branches bent without breaking. In the autumn she gathered what had fallen, dried each one on the windowsill, and sent them down the hill in a tin of her own, one for every boat still coming in late.