Black line tattoo of a tree with roots on the upper back of a woman in a forward fold, in fine line botanical style.

Tree with roots tattoo on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a wide-legged forward fold shows a black tattoo of a tree with a spreading root system across the middle of her back. The linework is fine and the design is shaded in black and grey. The subject is shot from behind against a bright window with trees outside, and her head is down so her face is not visible.

Fine line Botanical Back Tree Root Woman Window

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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

Dear Oriel, the Count has finally signed the order, so the old lime at the bridge gate may stay, though the masons are sulking about their cellars. I write from the cistern house under Vell, where I have spent six weeks with a lamp, a ball of waxed twine and a notebook gone soft from damp, tracing the roots of the ash the chroniclers call the Mother of Tallow Ford.

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They do not stop at the river wall as everyone assumed. They run down past the aqueduct arches, through the drowned vaults and out beneath the water in threads finer than a hair, and at every fork a root divides the way the crown divides above, so that the tree is planted twice over, once in the sky and once in the dark. The steward wanted them cut back to save the foundations. I measured them instead, and the foundations are sound. It is the cellars that are rotten.

In the lowest vault, where the water comes up to my ankles, I found a column of tally marks scratched into the stone. Not a mason's work. The strokes lean and wander the way a child's do, and there are one hundred and twelve of them, each one a year the tree has drunk from the river. Beneath the last mark someone had carved a smaller tree, its roots reaching down to meet the old ones, and beside it a single new stroke, still pale where the chisel bit.

Tell the Count the roots are sound. Tell him the tree asks for very little, only to be left where it can reach both ways. I will be back above ground before the frost, with fresh twine and a lamp that needs trimming, and I will bring you the notebook so you can see the drawings. Yours in the dark, Ilse Marrow, Rootwarden of Vell.