Black linework tree of life tattoo with green leaves and spreading roots, in a botanical style, on a area of skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life with roots on skin

Botanical · Mixed · Photo

A tree of life with a full, rounded canopy and branches that curve into a bare trunk and then spread into a network of roots at the base. The outlines and leaf details are drawn in dark black linework, with shading used sparingly, and several leaves are filled in green. The design sits centrally in the frame against warm, pale skin, with the roots fanning out across the lower half.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The council wanted the ash down by Friday, and Mrs Varley wanted it kept, so I spent Tuesday on my knees at its foot with a hand fork and a flask of tea going cold on the wall. The storm had stripped the trunk bare, but the crown still held a few green leaves at the very tips of the branches, as if nobody had told them the season was over.

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Her husband had planted it the spring their daughter was born, she said, and every birthday he had marked the child's height against the back door frame in pencil. I pulled back the leaf litter and found the roots fanning out under the lawn like cracks in a dropped plate, thin ones and thick ones knotted together. One had split the old brick edging of the path. Another had wrapped itself around a rusted watering can nobody had moved since the seventies and grown straight through the handle.

I told her the roots were the problem, that they had lifted the drain. She didn't argue. She sat on the step with both hands round her cup and said, 'Dig where you need to, love, but leave the one that goes under the shed.' So I cut the drain roots clean and left the rest, and the shed root ran on beneath the wall toward the wild patch by the railway, where the bramble had got ahead of everyone.

On Friday the men came with their saw and took the crown down in an afternoon. Mrs Varley watched from the window with the kettle on. The next March she rang to say a green shoot had come up through the cracked brick beside the pencil marks, and it already had four leaves. I told her to leave it be.

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