Colour tattoo of red cherry blossom branches with black stems spreading across a person's upper back and shoulder blade, in a Japanese-inspired style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom branch across a back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows red cherry blossom flowers, some with pale shading, along thin black branches that curve from the lower back up towards the shoulder. Stems and smaller twigs are rendered in black and grey with soft shading, while the blossoms are filled in with bold red ink. Falling petals are scattered among the branches, and the design wraps diagonally across the upper back.

Japanese Botanical Back Cherry blossom Flower Branch Petal Red flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorin the ferryman had carried the same grey cloak across the river for thirty winters, and in all that time he had never once asked a passenger where they were going. The spring the cherry trees on the far bank came into flower, a girl stepped down onto his boat with a bundle under one arm and a black twig poking out of the cloth. She did not pay. She said she would pay on the other side, and Dorin could find no way to argue with that.

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On the far bank the orchard climbed the slope in rows, and the blossom lay so thick on the path that the stones looked red. The girl walked up between the trees without looking back. Dorin followed, because the fare was owed and the boat needed mending anyway. At the top of the slope an old woman was sweeping petals off a stone step, and the petals kept coming down faster than she could sweep them.

"You brought the branch," the old woman said. The girl unwrapped the cloth. It was the bare wood of the tree that had stood by the ferry landing until the flood took it, and the girl had pulled it from the mud at dawn. The old woman turned it over in her hands, then pressed the cut end into the soil beside the step. She looked at Dorin and said the fare was a true account of the night he had let that tree go, the one he had never told anyone.

So he told it, standing on the step with his cap in his hands. When he finished, the old woman nodded and went back to her sweeping. Dorin rowed home alone. Petals kept landing on the black water around the boat, red as coals, drifting behind him all the way to the landing, and he did not brush a single one away.