Black tree of life tattoo with a central swirl, branches with small red leaves and spreading roots, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A tree of life tattoo sits centrally on the upper back, with a bold black trunk formed from interlocking swirls, fine branches and root lines reaching down. Small red accents on the upper branches add colour to otherwise black linework and solid black shading. The photograph is framed from behind the subject, showing the back of the head, a bra strap and a plaid top at the edges.

Botanical Blackwork Back Tree Tree of life Branches Root Leaves Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swirl at the foot of the trunk was the first thing Maud carved, the spring the frost took the old ash behind the chapel. Her father said a tree that had lost its crown could still grow a new one if its roots were kept, so she dug around the stump every evening with a borrowed trowel, and every evening the lane's children came to watch and argue about whether it was dead.

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By June the roots had found the drain under the lych gate, and the cracked bell rope had wound itself up into the branches. Maud had stopped listening to the children. What she listened to was a knocking under the earth, which she was sure was sap, and which the vicar's wife insisted was a badger. They settled it by sitting up one night with a lamp and a flask of cold tea until the knocking came again, close under Maud's boots, and they both saw the soil lift in a slow ring.

It was not moles. It was a ring of red-brown leaves pushing up through the clay. Maud laid her palm flat on the mound and felt a warmth in it, the way you feel a sleeping dog. In the morning the stump had three new shoots, each the length of a finger, each with a leaf the colour of a rowan berry.

She never did tell the village what had turned the trunk into a knot of loops. She said only that the roots had wanted to be counted before they would climb, that she had counted every one of them, and that was the end of it.