Black and grey botanical tree tattoo with a trunk running up the spine and branching roots spreading across the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tree with roots spreading across a back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair pinned up and her arms raised is seen from behind, showing a large tree tattoo across her bare back. The trunk runs up the spine towards the neck, and fine branching roots spread outwards over the shoulder blades and down towards the lower back. The tattoo uses fine, varied grey and dark brown shading on pale skin, with a garden setting visible behind her.

Botanical Back Tree Root Branches Trunk Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ash came down in the August gale, and by the time Marjorie Tranter walked up the lane with a flask and a spade, the council men had already sawn the trunk into rounds and stacked them against the orchard wall. They had left the root plate alone. It stood on its edge in the gap like a black wheel, taller than her, packed with flints, scraps of blue bottle glass and the jawbone of a sheep nobody in Hale Street remembered burying.

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She and her brother Tom had planted the sapling the spring she turned seven, a whip of a thing from the nursery in Dunmere, and they had marked its height in pencil on the back door frame every birthday until the frame was striped to the ceiling. Tom had gone to Malaya at nineteen and not come back. The door frame was still there, and the pencil lines, and her mother had said it was time someone planed the wood smooth. Marjorie had said no.

The roots had gone further than either of them guessed. They ran under the privy and the kitchen step, under the lane and under the mill race, and when she worked the spade in beside the plate she found one as thick as her wrist, pale inside, weeping sap the colour of weak tea. She followed it with her hands. Forty feet off, under a bramble tangle, was the old village well, capped with a rusted sheet of tin, and the root ran straight down into it like a man going down a ladder.

She lifted the tin with the spade handle, filled her flask from the black water and carried it back up the slope. At the stump she poured it slowly over the cut, watched it soak into the pale wood, and by the time the flask was empty there was a green tip already pushing through the bark at the base of the trunk, no longer than a fingernail, leaning towards the sun as if it had been waiting for someone to ask.