Woman seen from behind with a black and pink cherry blossom branch tattoo running down her back in a Japanese-inspired botanical style, placed on the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom branch across a back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A woman seen from behind wears her dark hair in an updo with a red ribbon and a white paper flower. A black branch with pink cherry blossoms curves from the shoulder down the spine, and the design is set on bare skin above a loosely draped white fabric. The linework is bold and the blossoms are shaded in soft pinks against the dark branch, with a plain grey backdrop behind the figure.

Japanese Botanical Back Cherry blossom Branch Flower Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Tully kept the boarding house at the top of Marrow Lane, where the wind came off the North Sea with nothing between it and the windows. Every spring she told her lodgers that the sea would take a bit of the garden if it could, and every spring the old plum at the back put out its pink blossom anyway. It had stood there since before the terrace was built, bent the same way the wind had bent it.

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A sailor came in one March with a cough and a canvas bag. He took the attic room and paid a week ahead in coins that had been wet and dried many times. On the seventh morning he was gone, but the bag was left under the bed. Inside was a roll of paper, a pot of ink, and a single white flower folded from notepaper. Mrs Tully's daughter Ada found it and pinned the flower in her hair, because it was the only pretty thing in the house that did not belong to anyone.

Ada unrolled the paper in the garden. A black branch ran down the sheet from top to bottom, and along it were blossoms the sailor had shaded so carefully they looked soft to the touch. She held the drawing against the trunk of the plum, the way you might hold up a letter to check its spelling. When she lowered it, the real blossoms were drifting off the tree and over the wall, down towards the harbour.

Her brother Tom was out on the Cormorant with their father that morning, and the fog came in before noon, thick as wool. Ada stood at the harbour wall with the drawing folded in her apron and did the thing the sailor had never said but had clearly meant. She followed the petals. They settled on the grey water in a line, one after another, like a branch laid flat, and the boat came along it, slow and steady, until its bow nudged the steps. Mrs Tully never asked where the drawing had gone. The plum bore a full crop that summer, and every boat came in.