Black and white drawing of a tree of life woven through interlaced knotwork inside a Celtic knot border, presented as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life in a Celtic knot ring

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stylised tree with a full crown and spreading roots sits at the centre, its branches woven through a large interlaced knot. A band of Celtic knotwork with scroll-like interlace forms the outer ring. The image uses fine black linework and hatched shading on white, with no colour and a plain white surround.

Blackwork Tree of life Celtic knot Interlace Root Knotwork Ring Border

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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

The oak in the middle of Hollins Road Primary has been cut back twice since we left, but the rope swing still hangs from its lowest limb, and nobody at the reunion could stop looking at it. Forty of us stood in the car park with paper plates, pretending we had not all carved our initials into its bark in 1994 while Miss Fenn pretended not to see.

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Dev Sokolova got there first. She had always been the one who could tie a knot so tight that Miss Fenn needed a penknife to undo it. She walked round the trunk with her palm flat against the bark, following the roots where they had lifted the tarmac in a ring, and then the branches where they had grown through the chain-link fence and folded back on themselves in loops nobody could untangle. "It's gone wild," she said, and she sounded pleased about it.

Under the third loop, where the fence post met the trunk, we found the thing we had drawn that last summer term: a circle with a tree inside it, done in blue biro, and beneath it our promise, written in the wobbly capitals of nine-year-olds. MEET HERE WHEN THE BRANCHES CLOSE. The branches had closed. There was no gap left between the wood and the wire, and the words had been swallowed by a swell of grey bark.

We did not climb it. We were too old, and the ground was soft from the rain. We stood in its shade with our paper plates going soggy, and Dev laughed until she had to wipe her eyes, and somewhere behind us a bell started up in the school hall for nobody in particular. None of us moved until the second bell, which was the only one we still answered to.