Black linework tree with exposed roots and a red ink splatter behind it, drawn as a tattoo design on a white background, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree with roots and red splatter

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A bare black-lined tree with a dense canopy and long, spreading roots, with a face-like form in the trunk. Fine, fibrous linework builds the branches, while loose red and grey splatter spreads behind the upper trunk. A small bird silhouette sits to the right on white space, and the composition is centred and vertical.

Botanical Tree Root Branches Bird Splatter Face

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

Sit nearer the fire, lad, and mind the draught from that door. You've heard the brothers call the old ash in the cloister the Sorrow Tree, and you've wondered why Abbot Wulfric won't let it be felled. My grandmother told this one with her hands, so you'll have to make do with my poor voice.

Keep reading

Forty winters back the roots came up under the scriptorium like grey eels. They cracked the cistern and lifted every flag between the refectory and the chapel. Brother Anselm swore he would take the axe to it, so Wulfric went down with a lantern to see what held the tree so tight. He found a tin box of madder-red ink wrapped in oilcloth, and beneath it a letter from the village of Hollin Dale, the one that burned in the bad winter. It was a list of names, every soul who had died there, and the rain had run the ink until the paper bled.

That night Anselm climbed the trunk with his saw. A rook sat on the lowest bough, the one the children named Bell because it cried out each hour before the bells did. When he reached for the bark he saw a face pressed into the wood, eyes like knots, mouth open as if about to read. It asked him, in a voice like dry leaves, to say the names aloud at the altar and never to cut what kept them. Anselm was a stubborn man, but he read them all until the candles guttered.

Next spring the roots had loosened their grip on the cistern and the flags lay straight. Brother Anselm still sweeps beneath the ash each morning, and the rook still sits where it always did, watching the gate. Some say the red stains on the cloister wall are only rust. I know better, since the ink has never quite washed out of the stone.