Back tattoo of a blossom branch with pink flowers and fine black linework, with script lines running through it, on a person lying in shallow water.

Blossom branch tattoo across a back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A person lies face down in shallow, clear water with their back facing the camera, showing a large botanical design of a branching tree with pink blossoms and green leaves. The fine black linework is detailed and sits over the shoulder blades and down the spine, with thin lines of script woven between the branches. Colour comes from the pink flowers and teal leaves against the black lines and skin, with a pale bikini top and sunlit water in the background.

Botanical Fine line Back Blossom Branch Tree Flower Leaves Script Text Tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ilse kept a cherry branch in a jar on the windowsill of the ferry house, where the river divided two valleys that had not agreed about anything for three generations. Every spring the blossom opened on that branch before it opened on any tree on either bank, because it had been cut from the old tree on the far side and carried over the water in a wet sack.

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The guards at the crossing always asked what she carried. She told them words, and they asked to see the words. So she had copied her mother's letters onto thin paper and tied them into the twigs with green thread, so that a man searching the bag would find only sprigs and leaves. Tomas, the youngest of the guards, held the branch up to the lamp and read the lines that wound along the wood. One was about a well that had gone dry. Another was a debt of six hens. A third gave a name for a child who had not yet been born. He could not read them all, so he let her pass and went back to his stove.

When the valleys quarrelled over the water and the bridge was closed, Ilse's daughter took the branch across the river at night in a cloth against her chest, swimming the cold stretch below the weir with one arm raised. By the time she reached the other bank the blossom was open and pink, though it had been dry in the jar that morning. Everyone on both sides had read the letters by then, and nobody could agree on what they meant.

The daughter planted the cutting in soft ground by the water. By the next spring there were two trees standing either side of the river, and the leaves of the new one had already begun to lean out over the current toward the other.