Black and grey botanical tattoo of a tree whose roots and leaves curve into a globe, placed between the shoulder blades on a woman's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree on a globe across the upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small tree sits on top of a globe, with its roots and leaves wrapping around the lower curve of the circle. The linework is fine and partly stippled, with shading built up in the leaves to give depth. The tattoo is entirely black and grey against pale skin, and the photograph is taken from behind so the subject is centred on the upper back.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The orchard at Vellum Hollow had one tree that refused to grow straight, and Hesper Quill had been sent to measure it before the lord's surveyors came to cut it for ship timber. She carried a brass chain, a notebook, and a jar of wet clay for taking impressions of the roots. The ground around the trunk was soft and cold, and when she knelt to dig, the soil came away in black crumbs that smelled of rain on iron.

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The roots did not go down the way roots should. They curled out sideways and wrapped back under the slope, following a ring of stones that someone had laid in a circle long before the village had a name. Hesper traced the ring with her chain. It closed on itself at the far side, the way a coin closes, and she realised the tree was not growing out of the hill so much as holding it, its branches spreading over the top like a hand over a bowl of water.

She wrote the measurements down as neatly as she could. Then she sat back against the trunk and watched the lamps come on in the valley below, one by one, each village light set on the curve of the land where the old stones ran. At dusk the surveyors' horses came up the lane, and she heard the rope unspooling, but she did not stand. She pressed her palm flat to the bark and felt the sap move, slow and deliberate, all the way round the world.

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From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.