Black ink line drawing of a large tree with a full canopy and twisting roots, in a botanical style, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life with flowing roots

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black linework drawing of a broad tree with a dense, cloud-like canopy, branches that split into fine twigs, and a trunk that divides into long, curling roots. The lines are a mix of thin outlines and small curls, with some shading in the roots and leaf clusters. The image is a plain white background with no colour, and the tree is centred and fills the frame.

Botanical Tree Root Branches Leaves Tree of life

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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

Dear Maren, the surveyors came back today and they have finally measured the old ash on Crowley Lane, the one we used to climb before the council fenced it. Forty-one feet to the first branch, they say, and the root plate has pushed up under the pavement so far that the bus shelter tilts. Mr Okafor from number nine stood in the road with his hands in his coat and said it was a wonder nobody had been killed. I said nothing. I was thinking about the night you tied your red ribbon to the lowest bough and told me that anything you planted would eventually come looking for the people who planted it.

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I went down to the lane after dark, when the streetlamps buzz and the canopy goes black against the orange sky over the ring road. The tree is still there, though half its crown has been cut for the wires. Where the trunk splits, the roots run out under the houses in long curling loops, and I could see the fence panels bowed outward like ribs. Somewhere below them the water main has been leaking for a month. Nobody has found where, because everything under that lane is tangled into everything else.

I sat on the kerb with my back against the railings and worked out that I have lived on this street for thirty years without once asking what was holding it up. Maybe that is what the ribbon meant. The branches reach for the sky, but the reason they reach is down there in the dark, in the knotted, patient work nobody bothers to draw.

The council will take it down in March. Come home before then and walk the lane with me. We can look for your ribbon in the roots.