Black and grey tree of life tattoo enclosed in a circle on the forearm, drawn in fine line with dotwork shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A leafless-looking tree with a full, rounded canopy and spreading roots fills a circular design on the forearm. The linework is fine and detailed in the branches and roots, with stippled dots softening the outer edge of the crown and the base. The tattoo is shown in black ink and grey tones on pale skin against a plain light background.

Fine line Dotwork Botanical Forearm Tree Tree of life Root Branches Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Hollin Bank talked about what lay under the pit, but everybody knew the roots of the old oak on the chapel green went down further than the shafts. My father used to say the tree was the only thing in the valley that had never been paid to dig.

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The winter the Harrow seam flooded, I walked the green every morning with a flask and a notebook, counting the rings I could see where lightning had split the trunk. Mrs Pryce from the Co-op said I was mad to be out in it. She had her own worries. Her son was on the back shift at Number Four, and the men had started leaving lamps lit in the cabin windows so the others could find the way home.

In March the water came up through the old roadways and stopped at the third stone level, exactly where the surveyors had found a root as pale and thick as a man's arm. The engineers wanted it cut. I stood in front of the stump with a shovel and refused, and for three days the village argued over one tree while the pumps ran. On the fourth morning the water dropped. Nobody could say why. The surveyor, a young man from Leeds with clean boots, drew the root on the back of a form and asked me to sign it as a witness.

I still have the copy. When I look at it I think of that root running sideways under the whole village, feeding nothing I could see, holding the ground still so the rest of us could sleep. The lamps are out in the cabins now. The oak is still on the green, the children climb it on Sundays, and nobody has yet asked it to move.