Black line drawing of a tree of life with leafy vines and interlaced Celtic knotwork roots, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life with knotwork roots

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical tree of life fills a circular frame, with a thick trunk, spreading branches and leaves drawn in clean black outline. Interlaced knotwork and looping vines run through the crown and sweep down into the tangled roots at the base. The image is a flat, high-contrast black line drawing on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Botanical Tree of life Knotwork Leaves Vine Root Branches

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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

You find the sycamore on the eleventh floor landing of Carlow House, the one nobody has bothered to cut back since the council stopped sending men with saws. It has pushed up through a crack in the car park tarmac, slipped past the bins, and sent its roots under the foundations like a hand sliding into a glove. Someone has scrawled MOVE on the lift door in biro, and beneath it, in careful capitals, NOT YET.

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Mrs Adeyemi on the fourth floor says the tree was here before the blocks, that her grandmother's village had one just like it, and the knots in its roots were the paths people walked when the rain came up the valley. You don't believe her, but you carry a flask up to the roof every evening anyway, and you find yourself tracing how the vines loop over and under the railings, never quite closing a circle.

In March the demolition notice goes up on every stairwell. You measure the trunk with a length of washing line and tie a knot where the line meets the bark. Then you take the spare keys from the caretaker's drawer, the ones nobody ever asks for, and at two in the morning you walk the roots with a torch, following them under the concrete towards the old pump house, where the ground is soft and cool.

By dawn the crane is in the car park and the whole estate has come out in dressing gowns. Nobody lays a finger on the sycamore. The foreman crouches by the roots, shines his own torch along the tangle, and asks who dug the drain they've found running straight under the north wall. Mrs Adeyemi points at you. You hand him the washing line, knotted where the roots begin, and he laughs, then coils it carefully over his arm and tells the crane driver to go round.