Dark navy line drawing of a stylised tree of life with ornate branches, leaves and roots on a pale teal background, shown as a design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life with roots and swirls

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A symmetrical tree of life fills the frame, with a thick trunk, branching limbs, leaf clusters and spreading roots. The fine ink linework is combined with dotted lines, small rosettes and swirling ornamental details. The dark navy ink sits on a pale teal, grungy square background.

Botanical Dotwork Tree Tree of life Root Branches Leaves Swirl Flower Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Cook Ada Pruett kept the tin wedged behind the flour sacks, where the damp couldn't reach it and the bosun wouldn't think to look. Inside were eleven seeds the colour of old pennies, given to her by a woman on the quay at Valparaíso who had gripped her wrist and said the roots of anything worth having go down further than the mast.

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The Marigold Bell lay becalmed for nineteen days off the Horn. The biscuit ran short, the water turned green, and by the third week the men were looking at the galley door the way they looked at the sea. Bosun Tull said a ship with a stowaway seed was a ship with bad luck, and he meant to have it over the side before the wind came back. Ada said nothing. She filled a pannikin from the last clean cask, pressed one seed into the dark of the flour sack, and hummed under her breath until the men went below.

The seed split in two days. Within the week its stem had pushed through the bread board, and a root no thicker than thread had found the seam where the caulking was failing and kept going. Ada watered it with her own ration. The men, with nothing to do but watch, began to notice the water in the casks tasted sweet again, and the shoals came up beneath the hull as though someone had called them.

When the Marigold Bell limped into Falmouth, the tree had lifted the galley floor and wound its roots round the keel like a hand round a rail. Tull came up the gangway with his cap in his fist and asked Ada what she wanted for it. She told him to sit down in its shade and eat his dinner, and that was the only price she ever named.