Entwined Oaks Tattoo Meaning

Partnership, union, mutual support, and two lives grown as one.

Baucis and Philemon were the only people in the village who opened their door.

Zeus and Hermes traveled through Phrygia in disguise, testing the hospitality of its people. Every door was closed to them. Then they came to the small cottage of Baucis and Philemon — an old couple, poor, who gave the gods everything they had: wine that refilled itself, food they could barely afford, their bed. When the gods revealed themselves, they destroyed the village that had refused them and transformed the couple's cottage into a temple.

They were given one wish. They asked to die together — neither one to outlive the other, neither one to have to grieve the other's absence. The gods granted it. When the time came, Baucis and Philemon stood before the temple they had tended all their lives and watched each other become trees — he an oak, she a linden, growing side by side from the same soil, their branches intertwining above the roofline of the temple below.

Ovid tells this story in the Metamorphoses as the image of the perfect love: not the passionate, consuming kind, but the kind that has lasted so long it has become structural, the kind where two lives have grown so thoroughly together that the only loss the people in it cannot survive is the loss of each other.

The trees that grow together long enough begin to share root systems — particularly in forests, where the roots of neighboring trees graft to each other through contact, trading water and carbon through the junction. The trees that Baucis and Philemon became are the trees that forests actually are: individuals whose boundaries have dissolved underground into something that functions as a single organism.

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