Black and white photo of a woman seen from behind, with a solid black tree of life inside a Celtic knot circle on her upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life in a Celtic knot circle on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with long blonde hair, seen from behind, shows a large solid black tree of life inside a knotted Celtic circle on her upper back. The tree has a full crown and spreading roots, drawn with bold dark fills and interlaced border lines. The black and white photograph is softly lit, with the hair falling across the shoulder and the dark top framing the tattoo.

Blackwork Botanical Back Tree of life Celtic knot Circle Root Tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dough has been sulking in the bottom of the bucket since the middle watch, and you are the only one aboard who knows the galley stove runs hot on the larboard side. You wedge the pot against the fiddle rail with your hip and swear at the swell under your boots, because the sea is up and the Hebrides are somewhere behind a grey wall of rain.

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Old Ruairidh, the carpenter, comes down the companionway with water running off his oilskins and stops at the bulkhead. He was there the day the planking was cut, when this ship's oak was still a tree on a hill above Loch Eil. He tells you again how a tree that size is held up as much by what goes down as by what goes up, and how an oak's roots can reach as far as its crown spreads. You tell him the bread does not care about roots. He laughs and takes the knife from the rack.

By the end of the watch the stove has died and the galley is a cold cave of tin and lamp smoke. You find the crew in the forecastle, pale and quiet, and you go back for the last sack of flour because nobody has eaten since noon. Ruairidh has scratched a ring of interlaced knotwork into the underside of the hatch, the lines running over and under each other until you cannot tell where one begins. Inside the ring, in the candlelight, he has cut a tree with its roots spread wide through the grain.

You shape the loaves round, score a single line through each, and bake them on the grate of the lamp because it is all you have. When they come out, you break one in half and pass it along the table, hand to hand, the way bread has always gone at sea. The timbers groan around you and hold, and nobody at the table needs telling where the good wood came from.