Black tree tattoo with bare branches and spreading roots on the inner wrist and forearm, in a blackwork botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree with roots on a wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A raised hand and wrist show a solid black tree with a wide, bare canopy of thin branches and a trunk that splits into spreading roots. The linework is fine and branching, with the dense black fill giving a silhouette effect. The tattoo sits centrally on a pale background, with the composition cropped to the hand and forearm.

Botanical Blackwork Forearm Tree Root Branches Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Day nine of the snow, and the lane is still gone. Uncle Tobias says the drifts will hold until the thaw, so we have the inn to ourselves: four guests, two goats in the lean-to, and the old oak standing where the yard meets the hill. From the back bedroom window it looks like someone has drawn it in ink on white paper, every twig black against the sky, the trunk bare to the first fork.

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Mrs Pardoe came down to the kitchen this morning asking after the cellar again. The flags over the far bin have lifted since the autumn, and when Tobias knelt to look he found roots as thick as his wrist pushing up through the mortar, running down under the house and out the other side. He wanted to cut them. Mrs Pardoe said her husband planted that oak the year they married, and that a tree doesn't take a house without asking, it only goes where the water is.

I went down with the lamp after supper to see for myself. The roots had split a crate of Tobias's bottled cherry and furred the glass with pale threads, but they had not touched the barrels. They ran along the wall like the veins on the back of an old hand, and I stood there longer than I meant to, listening to the snow ticking on the cellar hatch above.

Tomorrow I will tell him to leave the roots be. Then I will go up and look at the oak again, because it is the only thing out there still doing what it was made to do, reaching up into nothing and holding on to the ground underneath.