Black and grey drawing of a circular tree of life design with leafy branches, vines and Celtic knotwork roots.

Tree of life in a circle with knotwork roots

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A tree with a full, circular canopy of leaves and curling branches sits inside a round frame, with its trunk and roots spreading into interlaced knotwork at the base. The linework is fine and precise, with shaded black areas behind the white leaves and branches that give strong contrast. The drawing is done in black and grey on a pale background and fills the frame evenly.

Botanical Tree of life Leaves Branches Root Knotwork Vine Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ground was too hard for the spade by eight, so Dai took the axe to the frozen clay at the edge of the bottom field while I held the lamp steady over the hole. The ash had come down in the gale before Christmas, and nobody had wanted to touch it, because its roots had gone under the wall and out into the lane.

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By noon we had cleared enough to see them properly. They didn't run the way roots are supposed to, straight and sensible. They looped back on themselves and crossed and tucked under each other, plaited round a flat grey stone the size of a loaf, so tight you could not have slid a knife between. Dai knelt in the mud and traced one with his glove. 'My dad said the old boys planted this line when they wanted a fence nobody could argue with,' he said. 'You don't dig out the thing holding the field together.'

We filled the hole back in with the stones we'd pried loose and left the knot where it lay. Dai drove the axe into the chopping block and said he'd bring the wood round for kindling. I walked up to the house with the lamp off, the sky already going the colour of dishwater.

That night the kitchen window had frozen from the corners inward, the glass furred so thick that the yard light came through as a pale disc with the black bones of the sycamore stretched across it. I breathed on the pane and watched the frost go soft in a small circle, and through it the branches looked as if they were growing back the other way, up from the stone, the way the roots had gone down.