Coloured line drawing of a tree whose trunk forms a double helix, with leafy branches, roots, birds and butterflies, styled as a botanical tattoo design.

Tree of life with DNA helix trunk and roots

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows a leafy tree canopy above a trunk twisted into a double helix, with roots spreading across the base. Birds, butterflies, flowers and small falling leaves surround the central figure. Fine ink linework is shaded in browns, greens and touches of pink and teal on a cream, parchment-style background.

Botanical Tree Root Leaves Branches Bird Butterfly Flower Vine

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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

The orchard gate at Hollin Cross has not closed properly since the spring the frost took the north wall, and you have stopped trying to fix it. Your grandmother used to say the old apple tree by the stile was the first thing planted here, and that every family in the parish owed it a stick of kindling or a bowl of cider each midsummer. You never believed her. Now you stand with a bucket of windfalls and watch a wren hop along the twisted grain of the trunk, where the bark has split into two long strands that wind around each other all the way down into the mud.

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The roots are the strange part. They do not stay under the soil the way roots should. They come up out of the ground in pale, curling knuckles and spread over the path like the fingers of a hand that wants to hold on to something. Last Tuesday the postman stepped over one and swore he saw a blue tit feeding from the gap between two of them, though the bird was not there when you looked. Mrs Abernethy from the shop says the roots are growing towards the church. You told her the church has been sinking for a hundred years and it was never the tree's fault.

You decide, in the end, to do what your grandmother asked and leave the bucket at the foot of the trunk, between the two spirals of bark. In the morning there is nothing in it but rain and a single small leaf, green on one side and rust on the other, turning slowly in the water. It is the first thing in the orchard you have ever been sure was keeping its own time.