Two tree design drawings side by side: a black linework tree of life with roots inside a circle on the left, and a colourful swirling tree with a braided trunk on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life designs in ink and colour

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

The left design shows a tree of life with a full canopy of rounded leaves, exposed roots and a braided-looking trunk, enclosed in a circular border decorated with stars and small motifs. It is drawn in black ink using fine lines, dots and hatching for shading. The right design is a flat vector-style tree with looping, curling branches and leaves in pink, yellow-green, olive and grey, set against a white background with a braided trunk.

Botanical Tree Tree of life Root Leaves Swirl Circle Braid Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bread was the only thing aboard the Marisol Vane that never lied to me. Forty days out from Tilbury the flour had gone grey with damp and the potatoes were sprouting in the locker like something trying to escape, but Mr Okonedo still wanted his loaf every morning at six, so I kneaded it on the steel table with the ship's roll working through my knees.

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The cook before me, a Shetlander called Hallam, had left a seed tin wedged behind the flour bins. Inside were a dozen acorns, each wrapped in a twist of old shipping timetable. He had scratched a ring on the lid and written beneath it in pencil: plant when land. I had no land in sight, only the pewter of the Bay of Biscay and a bank of cloud on the horizon that never seemed to close. I kept the tin anyway, the way you keep a promise to a man who has gone ashore for good.

At Ferrol I climbed the hill behind the harbour with a trowel borrowed from the bosun. The soil was red and smelled of rain. Where an old oak had already split the rock, I pressed three acorns into a crack and drew a circle in the dirt around them with my heel, the way Hallam had drawn his on the lid. Then I walked back down to peel the crew's potatoes, and my hands smelled of earth until supper.

Eleven months later the ship came back past the same headland, and from the rail I saw that the oak had grown tall enough to throw shade across the cliff path. Its roots had worked down through the cracks like rope round a bollard. Mr Okonedo found me grinning at a hillside and asked what was so funny. I told him the bread would be late, and it was.