Close-up of a fine line botanical tattoo of a black branch with red blossoms on the inner ear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blossom branch tattoo on the inner ear

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

A thin black branch with small red blossom dots curves across the inner ear, following the natural contours of the cartilage. The linework is delicate and the red dots are the only colour, set against the skin tone. A silver stud and hoop earring sit below the tattoo, and the rest of the head is out of frame.

Fine line Botanical Other Branch Blossom Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit down, the kettle can wait, because you'll not understand the branch on Mrs Pell's wall unless you hear it from the start. Her husband Tom brought the cutting home in a clay pot off a trawler called the Hesper, the year before the war. Nobody in Gull Steps had seen a tree like it, all thin black wood and little pink-red flowers that looked like they'd been dabbed on with a brush. Tom planted it against the cottage wall where the sea spray could reach it, and the old men said it would never take. It took.

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Every April the blossom opened and the fishermen going out past the breakwater would count the flowers on the wall and reckon their luck by the number. A full wall meant a good week. A bare one meant stay in the pub. Tom was out on the Hesper the spring the storm came in off the Dogger, and it was Mrs Pell herself who went down to the quay on the third morning with a pair of secateurs, because she'd decided she'd not have a thing blossoming for a man who wasn't coming back. She cut the branch back to the stump, right down to the grey wood, and went indoors and didn't come out for a week.

When she did, the wall was red. Something had got into the stump and it had put out new shoots, and the blossom came thick and early, more than any April before. The old men stood at the breakwater and counted it and didn't say a word.

Danny Harrow came up the Steps a fortnight later, the Hesper's deckhand, with his arm in a sling and a cutting wrapped in wet newspaper under his good arm. He'd been picked up off a Norwegian rock. Mrs Pell took the cutting from him without a word, then tied a length of red thread around the lowest twig, and she has tied one for every boat that's come home since.