Colour tattoo of two cherries with a green leaf and dotted trail on the upper arm, drawn with bold black outlines in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherries with a leaf on the upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two cherries on stalks, one in the foreground and one partly behind it, with a green leaf at the top and a small dotted trail running from the leaf toward the fruit. The cherries have heavy black outlines, with red and pink fills, darker red swirl shading on the front fruit, and a small highlight on each. The design sits centrally on a bare arm beside an orange sleeve, against a plain light background.

Neo-trad Dotwork Upper arm Cherry Leaf Stem Droplet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Tenterden believed my father when he said the old Merton tree would fruit twice in one summer, so he stopped telling them. He carried a ladder up that tree every June for forty-one years, and the last year he could still climb it, he sent me up instead with a bucket and a flask of tea gone cold. Mind the third branch, he said. It has opinions.

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The cherries hang in pairs off a single stalk, which is how you know a good tree, since the fruit never sulks on its own. I picked the front one first, the glossy one that had turned the colour of a cough sweet, and a bead of juice ran down the stalk and dropped onto my wrist. Dad said that was the tree signing for the goods. Behind it, the paler one had split a little on the sunny side, and a wasp was already drawing a dotted line through the air towards it, like a surveyor who had made up his mind.

The leaf was the trouble. It had grown across the path to the ladder, and I had to lift it aside the way you'd move a neighbour's curtain. Tucked beneath it was an envelope he had left in the crook of the trunk, addressed to me in capitals because his hand had gone by then. Inside was one line: pick the one behind first, the sun has been at it all week, and don't let the wasp have the lot. I laughed out loud up there on my own, and the wasp, offended, went off elsewhere.

I came down with the bucket heavy and the stalks between my teeth, as he always did, and set the pale cherry on the wall where the light falls. The pair of them sat there like two people who had said their piece and were waiting to see who would speak next. I ate the pale one. It was sweet all the way to the stone, exactly as he'd promised, and I have never once trusted a promise that sweet.