Coloured illustration of a tree of life whose trunk forms a DNA double helix, with leafy branches, green roots, birds and butterflies on a parchment background.

Tree of life with DNA helix trunk and roots

Botanical · Colour · Flash

The drawing shows a large tree with spreading branches and green leaves above a trunk shaped as a double helix, with a green rooted base spreading below. Fine ink linework defines the bark, twisting roots and small details such as ferns, flowers, butterflies and hummingbirds scattered along the helix. The muted cream parchment background is coloured with warm browns, greens and touches of pink.

Botanical Tree Tree of life Root Leaves Branches Bird Hummingbird Butterfly Flower Fern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, and mind the peat smoke. You want to know why the rowan at Scarrow Point has a crooked trunk? My grandmother used to say it was twisted by two brothers who would not stop arguing, so the tree grew round itself to keep them both in one place. That is a lie for children. The true version is in the roots, and you have to go down to the shore at low tide to read it.

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When the first Tulloch boat came in over the reef, there was nothing on Scarrow but grey rock and a spring that tasted of iron. Ewan Tulloch carried a seedling in his coat for eleven days across the sea, wrapped in wet sacking. He planted it where the spring ran out. Each summer after, the trunk grew in two strands, one climbing left and one climbing right, and every year the strands crossed over and wound back, like the halves of a rope. Ewan's daughter said the tree was counting. I never understood her until my own knees gave out and I started counting too.

The roots went down through the rock and into the sea. At spring tide you can see the green ones, the colour of old bottle glass, feeling along the seabed. Hummingbirds came one year, which nobody on Scarrow had seen before or since, and they fed from the foxgloves on the trunk.

So here is the last thing, then the tea's cold. Each whorl of the trunk has a notch cut into it, one for each child born on the island, and nobody has ever cut two in the same year. When the bark closes over a notch, it cannot be undone. Look at the lowest band, nearest the roots. You will find a notch so old it has nearly healed, and beside it a fresh one the width of a thumbnail. Somebody cut that one last spring. Go and see whose it is in the morning.