Black and grey linework tree of life inside a circle with two small red leaves, tattooed on a woman's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life on a shoulder blade

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A bare-backed woman, seen from behind with her head turned away, shows a tree of life tattoo on her upper back over the shoulder blade. The bare branches, twisting trunk and exposed roots are drawn in fine, sketchy black linework with fine shading, enclosed by a thin circular outline. Two small leaves on the right side are filled in red, and the rest of the ink is black and grey against warm skin with a blurred pebbled background.

Botanical Fine line Back Shoulder Tree of life Tree Branches Root Leaves Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ash had been dead for three winters when Marta Dunning came up the shingle with a hammer in her belt and a sack of nails over one shoulder, meaning to finish what the north gale had started. The whole parish agreed it had to go. Its trunk leaned toward the harbour wall like a man listening at a door, and every spring the sea took another yard of the bank beneath its roots.

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She stopped at the ring of flint the old men had laid around it. The first thing she noticed was that the bark was grey and the branches were bare, right out to the thinnest twig, except on the east side. There, two leaves hung on a stalk no thicker than a bootlace, red as rowan berries, and they did not rattle when the wind came off the water.

Her grandmother used to say that a tree keeps back what it cannot spend, and that you never cut the last living thing on a stretch of coast. Marta sat on the flint with the nails beside her and watched the tide slide in under the roots, lifting the stones and setting them down again, holding fast wherever it could.

When the harbourmaster came down at dusk with his lamp and his opinions, he found her beating the empty sack flat against a post. "Leave it," she said. "It isn't dead. It's only waiting for the rest of us to stop digging." He took his lamp home. In the morning the two leaves were still there, and someone had tied a strip of blue cloth below them, and then someone else had tied another.