Colour tattoo of pink cherry blossoms with black tribal swirl linework across the top of a foot, with painted toenails visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom and swirl on a foot

Botanical · Other · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a bare foot with a tattoo of pink cherry blossom flowers and small petals, joined by a sweeping black tribal-style swirl that runs from the ankle across the top of the foot. The flowers have red and pink shading and the outlines and swirl are solid black. The foot rests on a dark, glossy surface and fills most of the frame, with the toes at the lower right.

Botanical Other Cherry blossom Flower Petal Swirl Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair has pitched on the edge of Ashby Common in the first warm week of April, and it falls to you to repaint the sign over the Waltzer before the council man comes round. Your uncle Dessie has left his brushes soaking in a jam jar of turps that smells like a dentist's waiting room. You climb the ladder with a tin of black enamel while a thin rain beads on the canvas above you.

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Along the side of the caravan, somebody years ago painted a sweep of cherry blossom with a black line curling through it like smoke off a snuffed candle. Your grandmother called it the river. Every spring she touched it up with a sable brush no thicker than a hair, and every spring the petals flaked off in the wind before the first show. This year she is in the hospital in Leicester, and the river has gone grey at the bend where the wet gets in.

You mix the pink from the last of the tube, cadmium with a drop of white, and paint five flowers where the old ones have lifted. You work the swirl back up from the axle bolts to the step, following the line she always followed with her tongue between her teeth. The council man arrives at four, looks at the Waltzer, looks at the caravan, and says nothing about either. You keep painting until the light goes orange behind the dodgems.

The next morning a girl from the coconut shy stops by the steps and reaches out one finger towards a petal. Is it wet, she asks. You tell her it's only paint, dry since midnight, though you haven't checked. Let her touch it, you think. By Sunday the petals will be hard enough to bear a thumb, and the river will run on past the bend as if nobody ever had to fix it.