Black and grey tree of life tattoo inside a circle, with roots below and birds flying off the branches, on the upper back near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life with birds on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A circular tree of life fills the centre of the frame, with bare branches spreading upwards and a root system spreading across the bottom of the circle. Several small bird silhouettes lift away from the right side of the tree and drift towards the shoulder. The ink is solid black with no shading, set against pale, softly lit skin in a monochrome photograph.

Botanical Back Tree Root Bird Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old women of Skerrow Bay said the ash on the headland had once been a ship's mast, and that the birds lifting from its crown each autumn were the crews' souls going home. Nobody had seen a mast in the bay for two hundred years, but the tree still leaned its branches west, as if pulling against a wind nobody else could feel.

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Mairi Fenn, the net-mender's daughter, climbed it the spring her brother sailed with the herring fleet and did not come back. She sat in the fork with her knees drawn up and counted the rooks until the light went. Its roots ran down through the rock into the sea cave below, where her grandmother swore the first keel lay buried, and the tide hissed in and out among them like someone breathing through their teeth.

Each autumn after that she carried a cup of salt water from the tide pool and poured it at the foot of the trunk, as the custom said to do. The birds gathered on the top branches, a dozen at a time, and lifted one by one over the cliff towards the south, where the lighthouse on the Stacks blinked its patient count. Mairi watched them go and told herself it was only a flock moving on.

The autumn her hair turned grey, one bird stayed behind. It perched on the lowest bough and did not lift when the others did. When she reached up, it dropped a sprig of ash into her open palm, the leaves still green and wet, and flew off without a sound. She carried it down to the harbour at first light and tied it to the mast of her own small boat, and she waited there for the tide to turn.