Black ink tree of life with branches, leaves and roots enclosed in a dotted circle, tattooed on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree of life with roots on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A single tree with a bare-branched canopy of leaves and a thick trunk, with roots spreading below, all enclosed in a ring of small dots. The linework is solid black for the leaves and branches, while the trunk and roots are built from fine stippling that gives shading. The tattoo is centred on pale skin with plain background and sits neatly in the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Back Tree Tree of life Root Leaves Branches Circle Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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The big top came down in Lincoln on Tuesday and I still have sawdust in my hair. Your mother asked me to write, since you never answer the telephone box at the end of the lane, so here I am with the lamp lit and the moths knocking at the glass. The ash in the wagon yard is the one you planted the spring before you left. Dad said it would never take in that clay, and he was wrong. Two of the lower branches are bare now, the way they go in October, but the leaves on the crown still hang on as if they have been told a secret. I measured the trunk against the gate last week. It has grown a hand's width since August.

Mum is well, mostly. She sold the caravan with the painted horses to a man from Skegness who promised to keep the name on the side. The rings are packed in the tin under the stairs. She wants you to know she did not throw out your bolt box, though she said she would. I think about the roots most of all. Not the branches, which anyone can see from the road, but the way the pale clay by the wall kept sending its fingers down under the cobbles and under the drain, feeling for water it could never see. You told me once that a tree is just a long argument between the ground and the sky, and that both of them always win.

Come home for the harvest if you can, and bring the good chisels. The ash is ready to be measured properly, and I want you to be the one who reads the rings when we cut the first branch for the new stall. Leave the telephone box alone and write me a proper letter for once.

Yours in sawdust, Nell