Black fine line tree of life tattoo with spreading roots and a small owl perched on a branch, placed on a person's ribs.

Tree of life with owl on ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large tree with a full canopy of leaves, a thick trunk and spreading roots, with a small owl perched on a right-hand branch. The linework is fine and even, with shading in the trunk and roots, and the tattoo is entirely black and grey apart from the owl, which reads as a warmer brown tone. The tree is centred on the side of the torso, with the roots sitting near the lower edge of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Tree Tree of life Root Leaves Branches Owl

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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

Sit closer, the fire is only warm where you are sitting. My grandmother told this one the way I am telling it, so forgive me if the words come out in her order. There was a wood at the bottom of the valley where the Harrow family kept their bees, and in the middle of it stood an oak so old that nobody remembered it being young. Its roots went down past the water table, past the chalk, down to where the old stones lie. When the spring floods came, the villagers said the oak was drinking.

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One November a boy named Tobias Quill climbed it to fetch back his sister's kite, and he found a brown owl already sitting on the low branch, watching him the way a magistrate watches a man who has stolen a loaf. The owl did not fly. It only turned its head all the way round, slowly, and said in a voice like a rusted gate, "You may take the kite. You may not take the branch it is caught on." Tobias was nine years old and he had never been refused anything so politely. He argued. The owl listened, which is more than most magistrates do, and then it said the oak had been keeping count of every promise made beneath it for three hundred years, and it was tired of the ones that were broken.

So Tobias went home without the kite. He made his promises instead, one at a time, sitting at the foot of the trunk with his fingers in the roots, and each morning the owl was there to watch him keep them. He grew up, went to sea, came back, and when at last he was old, he asked to be buried beside the oak. The owl, they say, still sits on the branch above his stone, and if you walk the valley at dusk and go quiet enough, you will hear it counting.