Back of a person with a red cherry blossom branch tattoo in Japanese style, running from the lower back up towards the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom branch across a back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large cherry blossom tree runs diagonally across the back, with dark grey and brown branches curving up from the lower back towards the shoulder. The red blossoms are shaded with darker tones and lighter highlights to give them depth. The design fills most of the back and is framed by bare skin, with the figure's head cropped out of the top of the frame.

Japanese Botanical Back Cherry blossom Branch Flower Tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You nearly miss the tree. The reunion is in the old assembly hall, where someone has strung paper lanterns from the bars that once held the climbing ropes, and the buffet smells of warm sausage rolls and floor polish. Outside, past the fire door that still sticks, the cherry tree in the corner of the yard is the only thing nobody has repainted. Its trunk has a bulge where boys carved their initials, and its branches reach over the wheelie bins as if they want a look at the hall.

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Dev Pratt finds you there with two cans of cider and a face that has survived a lot of Christmases. He says the blossom used to fall in April right on top of the Year Six maths test, and that Mrs Hollis made everyone sweep it up before lessons, the only fair thing she ever did. You laugh harder than the joke deserves. Neither of you mentions the afternoon by the wall, when you both swore you would leave this town and only one of you had the nerve.

Inside, the DJ plays the song from the summer you were fourteen, and people you barely knew are holding each other up on the dance floor. You count the petals caught in the gutter, the pink gone brown at their edges, and you think the tree looks the way the room does: older, more crowded with dark wood than you remembered, still flowering with the stubbornness of something nobody asked to stay.

Dev holds out the second can. You take it. Over the wall a bus sighs at the stop, and you realise you have not decided whether to get on it. A single petal drops onto the rim of the can, and you let it stay there while you think.