Tree of Life Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a tree of life tattoo means

The difference from an ordinary tree is scale. A tree tattoo is usually about a family or a place; a tree of life is a diagram of everything, roots in the world below, trunk in this one, crown in the sky. That is why most of the designs here give the roots as much room as the branches, and why one cut off at the ground line has lost half of what it says.

The oldest religious reading is immortality. In Genesis the tree of life stands in the middle of Eden, and Adam and Eve are sent out so that they cannot eat from it and live for ever; in Revelation it grows again beside the river of the heavenly city, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, its leaves for the healing of the nations. A crown hung with fruit, like the heart-shaped tree on this page, draws on that tree whether or not the wearer is religious.

Kabbalah turned the tree into a diagram. Its ten sefirot, the qualities through which Jewish mysticism describes the divine reaching the world, sit in three columns joined by twenty-two paths, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the plain figure of open circles here is that tree. It comes from a living tradition whose observant members would not tattoo it, since Leviticus 19:28 is read as forbidding tattoos, so anyone outside it who wears one is borrowing.

The secular reading came from biology. When Charles Darwin sketched a branching tree in a notebook in 1837 and wrote "I think" above it, the image came to mean common descent, every living thing related through one trunk. Worn now, that is a way of belonging to something larger than a family. The seasonal trees add the last idea people usually mean: a life that loses its leaves and comes back.

Where the design comes from

Trees of this kind were carved long before anyone called them trees of life. Reliefs from the ninth-century BC palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud show a stylised sacred tree flanked by winged figures, and scholars still argue over what it meant. The Prose Edda, written by Snorri Sturluson in thirteenth-century Iceland, puts an eagle in the crown of Yggdrasil and the serpent Níðhöggr at its roots. The version Western occultists adopted was printed by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in the 1650s, and in Mexico the potters of Metepec still model painted clay trees of life with Adam, Eve and the serpent among the leaves.

Choosing yours

• Name the tree you mean, because each tradition is a different drawing. The scriptural tree carries fruit; Yggdrasil is an ash with an eagle at the top and a serpent in the roots; the Kabbalah tree is ten circles and their paths. The knotted tree closed inside a ring, sold as Celtic, has no single ancient original.
• The mirrored proportion decides the placement. With roots as wide as the crown the outline is closer to a circle than a column, so it sits well on a shoulder blade, the sternum or the back of the calf, fields where an ordinary tree flattens.
• Fine lines are where it fails. Roots are usually drawn finer than branches, so below about 10 cm they are the first part to blur into a dark mass; the minimalist tree here survives small by keeping only a few short ones.

Common questions