Japanese style back tattoo of a gnarled grey tree with pink cherry blossoms falling past it, above blue-green waves at the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blossoming tree and waves across a back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back tattoo shows a twisting tree trunk and branches shaded in grey, with pink cherry blossoms scattered across the upper back. Blue-green stylised waves with dark outlines fill the lower back, and a partial coloured flower design is visible on the left upper arm. The image is a warm-toned close view with the head cropped out and a plain dark background.

Japanese Back Tree Cherry blossom Wave Branches Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The petals came down on the 6.14 every April, and Mr Pryce in the old signal box used to say the driver ought to be paid extra for braking through them. I took over the box at Carrow Halt the spring the tree was marked for felling, which is how I came to be standing on the platform with a flask at seven in the morning, looking up at the trunk that grew out of the sea wall and twisted past the waiting shelter as if it were trying to read the timetable.

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The engineers had a letter for the company and a crack in the wall that they said was getting wider. Tom Wilde, who had been porter there for forty years, sat on the bench under the branches and would not discuss it. His mother had planted the tree from a cutting carried over on a fishing boat, he said, and a gale in 1947 had bent the trunk half over. It had been bending ever since to keep out of the wind, which was more sense than most of the men on the railway had shown.

I asked the foreman for a week. We climbed the lower limbs on a Sunday with a ladder and a bucket of cold tea, and on a branch above the wall we found a ribbon, faded to the colour of weak tea, knotted tight. Someone had written on the inside of the knot in pencil, Ivy, and a year, 1951. Tom looked at it for a long time and then told me to tie a new one beside it, so I did.

The 6.14 came round the bend just after nine. The petals lifted off the branches in the breeze and drifted over the carriage roofs and down past the wall, where the sea was turning grey and green over the rocks. The ribbons moved together on the bough, both of them, and the train pulled out with its windows full of falling pink.