Black and white photo of a woman's upper back showing a black tree of life tattoo with roots, inside a knotwork circle, placed over the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life in a knotwork circle on the back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph taken from behind shows a woman with long hair falling over her shoulder, so her face is not visible. A bold black tattoo of a tree with a full canopy and exposed roots sits within a circular border of interlaced knotwork on her upper back. The solid black ink and clean edges stand out against the pale skin, and the dark top frames the lower part of the composition.

Botanical Back Tree of life Tree Root Knotwork Circle Celtic knot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cart had lost a wheel below the ford, so Eilidh walked the last three miles with the ash sapling wrapped in wet sacking across her back. The carter swore at the mud and would not go a step further up the hill road. She did not blame him. Nobody in Dunmere liked the crossroads after dark, and the sapling was only a sapling, all bare twigs and one bud she kept warm inside her coat.

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The ring stone stood where the roads met, cut around with knotwork that no mason in living memory could have made. Her grandmother had said the knots were a fence, and that the roots needed a fence the way goats need one, or they would wander off under the neighbours' land. Eilidh dug the hole beside the stone with a borrowed spade and set the sapling in it. She poured in the last of the goat's milk and said the names of everyone she had lost, because her grandmother had told her that roots hold onto names longer than people do.

That winter the well went black, and at night the people of Dunmere heard knocking under the chapel floor. Harrow the miller wanted the tree cut down. Eilidh told him roots only knock when they are hungry, and she went up the hill every evening with bread crusts in her apron. By spring the tree had a full crown, and the knocking stopped. Harrow's cough went with the frost.

In May the chapel bell rang at dawn with no rope pulled. The villagers went up the hill and found the ring stone warm to the touch and the knots worn smooth where hands had rubbed them for luck. Eilidh was sitting in the roots with her back to the trunk, watching the sun come over the ford where the cart's wheel still lay in the reeds.