Black line drawing of a tree of life within a circle, with spiral swirls, small stars and knotwork roots, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life in a circle with swirls and stars

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical tree of life sits inside a ring, with curling spirals forming its branches and two small four-pointed stars beside the crown. Thin, even black outlines form the design, with a star above the canopy and a braided knotwork pattern along the roots at the base. The image is a plain white background with no shading or colour, and the design fills the frame evenly.

Botanical Tree of life Swirl Spiral Star Knotwork Circle Branches Root

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The well by the hall turned brackish in the spring, and the steward sent Eithne down the hill with a bronze pail, because she was the only girl in Carrow who had not yet been afraid of the old tree. Its trunk stood where the river bent, and its roots ran under the bank in three braided strands, each as thick as a man's arm. Nobody dug near them. Her grandmother had said the roots were tied by hands older than the wall, and that a tree tied so would keep the water sweet for as long as the knots held.

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She knelt on the wet stones and followed the nearest strand with her fingers. Where the braid thinned she found a gap, a place where someone had hacked through for a stake, and grey silt had crept in and choked the spring. She had brought cord for exactly that. Her grandmother's knot passed under itself twice and then once more, and Eithne worked it slowly, the way she had been shown, until the braid stood whole. Above her the crown moved in a wind she could not feel on the ground, and the spirals on the branches turned like ferns opening.

The steward came down at dusk with two men and a measuring rope. He wanted the tree cut for beams, since river timber fetched more in Londin than the well ever had. Eithne stood between the roots and the axe and said nothing, because the star above the canopy had just come out, and the two small stars beside the crown had come out with it. She had learned that a thing in the sky was not something a steward could measure. He looked up, counted, and went back up the hill without his rope.

In the morning the spring ran clear, and the cord she had left knotted round the lowest branch was still there, bleached white by the weather. The village still ties a fresh knot in it each spring before the first bucket is drawn.