Black tree of life tattoo enclosed in a circle with spreading roots, on the inner forearm above a beaded bracelet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life in a circle on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black tree of life sits inside a circular frame on the outer forearm, with a full, branching crown and roots spreading along the bottom of the circle. The tree is rendered as a dark silhouette with fine negative-space detail in the branches and foliage. The photograph is warm-toned with a vignette, and the skin and tattoo are shown against a pale cream fabric.

Botanical Blackwork Forearm Tree Tree of life Root Branches Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mooring rope was still wet when Nell looped it over the bollard at Braunston, and the biscuit tin of cuttings knocked against her hip as she jumped down onto the towpath. The council men had felled the oak at the lock two days before. Her father had tied the Heron to its roots for thirty years, and now the trunk lay sawn into rounds on the grass, its crown still heaped against the fence like something that had fallen asleep mid-sentence.

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She went through the branches with a bread knife and a sack, cutting the thin green whips from the lower limbs where the sap still ran. The foreman watched from his van with a flask in his hand and didn't say no. When she turned back to the boat, her palms were sticky and the tin was full, the wet sacking stiff with resin and cold against her wrists.

Back aboard, she potted the cuttings in old compost in the coal scuttle, because it was the only thing deep enough. On the cabin table lay her father's sketchbook, open to a page he had drawn a dozen times over: a ring of ink, a tree inside it, roots looping out along the bottom like the lines of a map. He never told her why he kept drawing it. He only said the circle was to keep the thing from wandering.

At dusk she carried the scuttle back up the bank and knelt where the old roots met the mud. She pushed the first cutting in with her thumbs, then the next, and pressed the soil flat until the water came up cold around her fingers. The lock gates groaned. In the still canal the new shoots stood small and crooked, and their reflections made a ring of their own on the surface, waiting for the wind to settle.