Red cherries with green stems and a leaf, surrounded by black stars and dots, in a colour tattoo on the side of the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherries and stars on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A pair of red cherries hangs from green stems with a single green leaf at the top left. Black stars and fine stippled dots drift outward from the fruit across the skin. The cherries are filled with solid red and dark shading, and the pale skin and dark fabric at the top frame the tattoo against a close crop.

Traditional Dotwork Thigh Cherry Leaf Stem Star Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now you'll want to know why Ada Pryce kept a cherry tree on the tip, when every other soul in Hatton Row said the spoil would poison anything with roots. Sit closer, the fire's low and I've only the one voice left for telling.

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She planted it the spring her husband went down the number three shaft and didn't come up on the cage. Black dust everywhere, grey sky, and she pushed a bare stick of a sapling into the heap with a tin of bathwater and her two hands. Folk laughed. Mr Dunn from the chapel said it was a daft romance. But by midsummer that stick had leaves, green as a parrot's wing, and by August two cherries hung off one stalk, red as a pit lamp when the men came up flushed from the heat.

Her boy Sam was nine that year, and he'd lie on the tip at night counting stars through the smoke. Each one he counted, he swore, fell off the sky and landed on his arms like soot that wouldn't wash. He said the stars were coming down to see what the tree was up to. Ada told him stars don't come down, they just get tired of being looked at and settle where it's warm.

When the cherries were ripe Sam climbed the tip alone and picked the pair, carried them in his fist down to the pit gate where his father's mates were queuing for the cage. He held them up. Nobody spoke. Then his father, grey to the eyebrows, bent and bit one clean through and laughed like a man who'd forgotten how. The tree's still up there if you go looking. Mind the dust.