Black blackwork tattoo of concentric tree rings with a ragged black band border, covering the back of a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree rings on a calf

Blackwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A leg from the knee to the ankle, showing a large tattoo of concentric tree rings that resembles a cross-section of a tree trunk. The rings are built from bold black lines and dotted marks, with a small star-like knot near the centre and a solid black band with a ragged edge framing the top and bottom. The image is taken straight on against a plain white wall, and the tattoo is entirely black ink and grey skin.

Blackwork Botanical Calf Ring Knot Band

Find an artist for this

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

Count from the knot outwards, Tamsin said, and don't let the sawdust make you lose your place. You knelt on the flagstones of the almshouse cellar with a stub of chalk in one hand and a lantern in the other, while the great round of oak lay between you like a map somebody had dropped in the mud. The men had hauled it out of Hollin Wood the week before the frost, and nobody in Dunmere could agree on who it belonged to.

Keep reading

The wide rings were the good years, when the summers came wet and the parish ate its fill. The tight ones were harder to read, bunched together like the stitches on a mended sleeve. Near the edge a band of rings ran so thin you had to hold the lantern flat against the grain to see them at all. Tamsin said that was the year the fen fires blackened the sky and the wood stopped growing for a whole season. She said it as if she had been there, and perhaps her grandmother had.

At the centre sat the knot, a star of hard dark wood where the first shoot had been bent over and tied to a stake. Aldous Fenn had tied it, forty years before the steward's men came with their measuring rods, to mark the boundary between the common and the manor. The tree had grown around the twine until the twine was gone, and every ring since had swung wide to keep clear of it. Your chalk line ran from the knot to the bark, crossing every year, and the steward's men were already knocking at the door upstairs as it reached the edge clean and straight, the way a boundary should.