Black and grey blackwork tree of life with roots, inside a Celtic knotwork ring, tattooed on the upper back of a woman with long blonde hair.

Tree of life in a Celtic knot ring on a back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a woman seen from behind, with her face turned away from the camera. A solid black tree of life with spreading branches and roots sits inside a circular Celtic knotwork border on her upper back, near the shoulder blade. The bold, high-contrast linework and dense black fill give the design a graphic, stencil-like quality against soft natural light and a dark top.

Blackwork Botanical Back Tree of life Root Celtic knot Circle Branches

Find an artist for this

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 ovens are lit by ten past four, and I'm the only one awake on Pump Street who can tell a loaf that is proving from one that has given up. Mr Pryce taught me that with his thumb pressed into the dough, not with a clock. He kept a wooden peel hung above the bench, its handle worn pale, and on its blade someone had burned a tree with roots spreading out like cracks in ice.

Keep reading

He never said who made it. When I asked, he tapped the flour from his fingers and said the peel had outlived two owners and would outlive me if I oiled it properly. So each morning I oil it. I shape the ring loaves the way he did, a round of dough folded over on itself so the crust opens in a knot, and I score the top with four lines that spread from a single point. The customers call them wreath bread. Nobody asks why the scoring looks like branches.

In March the council came with a letter about the sycamore by the bus shelter, the one whose roots had lifted half the pavement. I went out at dawn with a flask and sat on the kerb while the men measured it. In that grey light it looked like nothing much, a trunk and a crown of bare limbs. But its roots ran under our wall, under the flour store, under the yard where Mr Pryce buried his dog.

The men decided to leave it. They put up a fence and a sign. I brought back a loaf still warm and set it on the peel, and when the sun came up the tree and the bread threw the same shadow across the bench. I cut the first slice myself and handed it to the first person through the door, who thanked me and walked off with it under her arm. That was the whole ceremony, and I think Mr Pryce would have called it enough.