Pencil drawing of a tree of life with leafy branches and roots forming a circle, a botanical design for a tattoo with no body part shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life pencil design in a circle

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a tree with a wide, leafy crown and sweeping branches, its roots curving around the base to form a circle. The linework is fine and the leaves are shaded with soft graded tones, with a few loose strokes left open against the white background. The drawing is entirely black and grey and is centred with even spacing around the circular outline.

Botanical Tree Tree of life Root Leaves Branches Circle

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, love, the lamps along Canal Street have been out since the gas men went on strike, so you'll have to take the tale by feel. My grandmother swore the tree in the circle stood on the corner of Parrot Lane, where the roots went under the cobbles and came up again in the basement of the chemist's. Nobody could say which of the three cellars the roots belonged to, so the landlords argued over them for forty years.

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There was a lamplighter called Tomas Greave who walked that circle every night with his pole and his tin of oil. He noticed the leaves were never still, even on the windless nights, and that the shadow the crown threw across the wet stones always pointed the wrong way, toward the river instead of away from it. He began to keep a ledger of the shadows, the way a clerk keeps accounts, and by the first frost he had written eleven pages of small grey figures that did not add up to anything a man could sell.

On the last night of the year the wind dropped and the whole crown went quiet at once. Tomas climbed the ladder to his lamp and found a single leaf lying on the glass, pressed flat as a pencil stroke. He carried it down in his palm, meaning to show someone, but when he looked again the roots had drawn back under the pavement and the circle was only a ring of old chalk. He still lights that lamp, they say, and still leaves the ladder propped against the trunk, in case the tree wants to come back up for the cold.