Black linework design of a leafy tree with a full canopy and spreading roots on a white background, shown as a blackwork flash drawing with no body placement.

Tree with spreading roots design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a leafy tree with a full, rounded canopy of branches and small teardrop leaves, set on a thick trunk. Its roots spread widely and branch out into many fine, curving lines beneath. The design is rendered in flat black on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Botanical Blackwork Tree Root Leaves Branches Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The oak at Hollin Cross had been there longer than the chapel, and everyone in Little Edge agreed it was the reason the river kept to its bed. When a lorry from Stockport took the bend too fast in the spring of 1956 and put its nose into the churchyard wall, Mrs Ada Pell came out in her apron and said the tree would have to come down before it fell on somebody.

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Walter Crane, who had felled timber for the estate before the war, walked round it with his saw over his shoulder and did not lift it. He pressed his palm flat against the bark, then knelt and brushed the leaf litter from the roots, which ran out under the lane like the veins on the back of an old hand. 'Ten years of rain are in these,' he said. 'You cut the top and the bottom goes on drinking.'

They argued over it at the Plough until closing. Ada wanted the wall mended and the tree gone. Walter wanted the lane moved. In the end the parish council did neither, and paid a boy called Tommy Hayes sixpence a week to sweep the leaves off the road. He did it all that summer, whistling, and counting the roots he could see.

By October the leaves lay across the lane in a yellow heap, and the lorry driver came back for his load of sheep dip and stood in the road a long while. Then he said he would find another way round, and he did. The oak kept its place at the cross. Tommy used to say that if you lay down by the roots on a still night you could hear the river going under the lane, and that it sounded like someone counting.