Large black tree of life tattoo within a circle, with leafy knotwork branches and roots, across a man's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life in a circle across a back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A man is photographed from behind on a beach, showing a large tattoo of a tree enclosed in a circle across his upper back. The tree is rendered in solid black with its trunk, roots and some leaves left as bare skin, and the branches and leaves are filled with interlaced, knot-like linework. The background is a pale blue sky and sea, and the composition centres the tattoo on the back.

Blackwork Botanical Back Tree of life Tree Leaves Root Circle Knotwork 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 gale took the top out of the old ash the week before Christmas, and Dad said we had to cut what was left before the sap rose or the rot would reach the crown. I went up the ladder with the bow saw while the ewes stood in the lee of the wall, their breath going up in clouds, watching me as if I owed them something.

Keep reading

Grandad planted the tree the year the lane was tarmacked. He used to say the roots went down as far as the branches went up, so nobody ever saw the true shape of the thing. He had tied a loop of orange baler twine round the trunk at shoulder height to mark how much it grew each year. The twine had sunk into the bark until you could barely find it, and I had to scrape the lichen off with my thumbnail to locate it.

When I cut through the third limb, the heart was black and soft, but the rings beyond it were pale and tight and the wood smelled of pennies and wet dog. Wedged in the fork where the limb had joined was a wren's nest, empty, woven from wool and fence wire and bits of blue baler string, every strand doubled back on itself so you could not tell where one started. It looked like the crown itself had been drawn up in knots and then left out in the rain.

I did not take the whole tree down that day. I left the trunk standing, bare-rooted on the frost, and stacked the cut wood by the gate for the range. I pulled the old twine from the bark and put it in my coat pocket. When I went down the field, the ewes followed me to the gate, because for forty years whoever came up that hill had brought them the bread.