Back tattoo of a gnarled tree with teal cherry blossoms and shaded grey roots, in Botanical and Japanese style across the upper and lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blossoming tree across a back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large tree with twisting branches and roots covers the centre of the back, with clusters of teal five-petalled blossoms along the branches. The trunk and roots are rendered in fine grey and brown shading that gives them texture and depth, while the flowers are flat teal fill with dark outlines. The tree is centred and fills the frame, with bare skin around it and a white strap visible at the right edge.

Botanical Japanese Back Tree Cherry blossom Flower Branches Root Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, the kettle has only just stopped complaining, and you'll want to hear the part about the roots before the fire goes down. My grandmother's aunt crossed the river at Cold Ford with one shoe, a tin of tea and a cutting wrapped in wet sacking. The guard at the bridge that year was a man called Ferenc Doyle, who had a moustache like a gate and no interest in plants. He poked the sacking with his stick and asked what it was worth. She told him it was worth nothing yet.

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She planted it on the far bank that same night, under a hawthorn that had lost its argument with the wind. Nobody expected it to take. Cherry does not like to be moved, the farmers said, and it certainly did not like the clay on that side. But every spring the twisting branches put out their small teal flowers, five petals each, and the men on the bridge started to stand a little straighter when they saw them, because a thing that refuses to be moved is a thing that knows where it belongs.

Years went by and the roots went down, and down, and they went under the river, which nobody had told them they could do. In the wet winter of the great flood, when the bridge shook and the posts gave way, the roots held the bank together where the stone would not. Ferenc's grandson, who had long since stopped minding the boundary and started minding the tree, carried sandbags along that bank for three nights straight.

So when they tell you the crossing is only a line painted on a post, you tell them about the tree. Its branches reach over both sides, and the roots don't ask to see anyone's papers.