Soft, painterly red and pink cherry blossom branch tattoo with grey stems across the upper back, seen from behind.

Cherry blossom branch across a back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A branch with red and pink blossoms and fine dark stems rises diagonally from the lower back up towards the shoulder. The flowers are shaded with soft, blended washes that fade into the skin, while the stems are drawn with darker, thinner lines. Red and pink ink dominates the blossoms, with black and grey on the branches, and the design is set against plain skin and a pale wall.

Botanical Japanese Back Cherry blossom Branch Flower Blossom

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cherry tree in Hollin Row chapel yard was the wrong colour for the place. Everything else wore the pit's grey: the washing on the lines, the coal on the window sills, the men's faces at shift change. Every March the branches came out pink anyway, thin and stubborn, and every March Mrs Pryce from the end house swore the dust would finish it before the petals dropped.

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I was fifteen and apprenticed to Harold Lewis, who painted signs for the Co-op and the Working Men's Club and, when there was money, the banners for the lodge. He gave me a sable brush and a jar of sepia and told me to draw what I saw, not what I thought I ought to see. So I sat on the chapel wall with a sketchbook on my knee while the blossom opened, and I learned that a branch never runs in a straight line. It leans toward the light, then doubles back where the wind has bent it.

The colliery whistle went on a Thursday, and the lane filled with men coming up in their dark clothes. Among them was my uncle Tom, who had been underground eleven days after a fall closed the east heading. Nobody said much. Harold set down his brush and took off his cap, and I saw him look at the tree the way he looked at a wet wall before deciding where the paint would go.

When the men had gone in, I turned back to my page. Tom had stayed under the branch with petals caught in his hair, so I painted him that way, faded at the edges, the dark lines firm only where he was solid. Harold came to look over my shoulder and said nothing for a long time. Then he pressed one finger to the wet paper, drew a rose wash into the shadow beneath the blossom, and said that was it, now it was true.