Black and grey fine line tree with stippled leaves and spreading roots, tattooed across the upper back near the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree with roots on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare tree with thin, spreading branches and a dotted canopy of leaves, growing from a thick trunk into exposed, branching roots. The linework is fine and dark, with stippled dots for foliage and soft grey shading behind the crown. The tree is centred on the upper back with plenty of clear skin around it.

Fine line Dotwork Botanical Back Tree Branches Leaves Root Trunk

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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

Mind the ditch, friend, there's always a ditch where the road bends past the salt flat. You'll see the tree before you see the sign. Nobody planted it. The old water men say the first road crew came out of Tucson with their chains and their theodolites and found it already standing there, bare as a wire fence, and they bent their line around it rather than cut it down.

Keep reading

Ask Mercy Ocampo what the tree does in a wet year. She drove a fuel tanker for thirty years and kept a tin cup on the dash for exactly this reason. Every April, when the wash ran brown for one afternoon, she'd pull onto the verge, sit under those branches with her boots in the mud, and wait. Leaves come out of nothing, she said. Not green, not yet. Little dark specks, like someone had shaken pepper over the twigs, and then they were leaves, and then the whole crown was humming with bees.

Her boy Teo left for the coast to study and didn't come back for eleven years. When he finally did, he came in a rented car with the windows down, and he didn't slow at the bend. Mercy was waiting on the verge with a jerrycan of water she'd carried out in the back of the truck. She said nothing. She poured it slowly at the root flare, where the trunk split into that grip of knotted roots, and the dry earth drank it in one long breath.

Teo sat down beside her in the dirt. Overhead the branches were thick with leaf, and he could see that every dark speck was something that had come back to the wood, one at a time, the way he had. Mercy handed him the tin cup. Fill it up, she said. The wash will be dry again by Thursday, and you'll want to remember the way.