Back tattoo of pink cherry blossoms with black shading running down the spine, interspersed with black characters, in a Japanese style on the upper and mid back.

Cherry blossom and characters down the back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A bare back shows a vertical design of pink cherry blossom flowers with yellow centres and scattered falling petals, following the spine from the shoulders to the lower back. Black characters run down the centre, and soft black and grey shading behind the flowers gives a smoky, misty effect. The colour is bright pink and orange against the grey shading, and the design is framed by the open skin of the back.

Japanese Botanical Back Cherry blossom Flower Petal Character Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink pooled at the bottom of every stroke again, the way it always did when the damp came in off the sea, and Emiko sat with the brush lifted above the rice paper until her wrist began to ache. Four characters. That was all her grandmother had asked for before the ferry: laughter, health, spirit, friendship. She had recited them like items on a shopping list, the way she recited everything, as though the words could be bought from the grocer on the corner and carried home in a string bag.

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Outside the window the cherry tree had given up its last flowers in a single warm night, and now the petals came loose in the wind and drifted past the glass. One landed on the wet ink of the second character and stuck there, a pale pink coin pressed into the black. Emiko thought about wiping it away and didn't. She had spent three weeks trying to make the strokes perfect, and perfect was not what her grandmother had meant. The old woman had always said that a thing that falls has not been lost, only passed on to the ground, where it feeds something else.

When the sheet was dry she rolled it loosely, slid it into a cardboard tube, and posted it to a village on the coast she had never visited. Three weeks later a postcard came back. It showed a harbour in winter. On the reverse, in shaky pencil, her grandmother had written one line: the petal is still there, I can see it from the window. Emiko read it twice, then stood up and went to find the scissors, because somewhere in the flat there was a packet of seeds she had been meaning to plant.