Colour tattoo of a cherry blossom branch with pink flowers and black and grey limbs, wrapping across the upper arm in a Japanese-inspired style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom branch across an upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A branch of cherry blossom runs diagonally across the skin, with pink and red five-petalled flowers clustered along thin dark branches. The black and grey limbs have soft, shaded edges that suggest a brush-painted, ink-wash finish, and the bold red blossoms stand out against the paler skin. The branch sweeps from the lower left toward the upper right, with the thicker trunk curving around the arm.

Japanese Botanical Upper arm Cherry blossom Branch Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The committee wanted the blossom to look as if it had blown in off the street, so I was up the stepladder with a pot of size and a brush worn down to a whisker when the band came in to tune up. Three weeks, they had given me, and the whole north wall of the Haverley Rooms to fill with spring. I had lettered cab doors and painted coats of arms on brewery lorries, but I had never once painted a tree, and I told Mrs Okonedo at the cloakroom that I would manage.

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I started with the trunk because a trunk tells you where everything else must go. Black ink, thinned with so much water it was nearly grey, and I let the wood come up out of the plaster in one long sweep, then turned it round the pillar so it seemed to grow out of the building itself. The blossoms I did last, with a dab of red and a rag, five petals each, and no two pressed the same. Nora from the ribbon counter stood at the foot of the ladder one afternoon with a cup of tea going cold in her hand. 'Why does it go round the pillar?' she asked. 'Because it has to reach the window,' I said, and she looked at me as though I had said something sensible.

The dance came round in April. The branch swept from the lower corner of the floor up toward the high windows, and the couples turned beneath it in their good shoes, and for an hour the room smelled of wax polish and rain. Halfway through the foxtrot a petal came down through the open skylight, turned twice in the air, and settled on Nora's shoulder. She caught it and held it up to the lamps.

When the hall emptied I climbed the ladder once more with a dry brush. The painted blossoms were all where I had left them, except one low on the trunk, where a fleck of red had lifted and stuck to the ink like a fingerprint. I could not tell whether I had put it there or the tree had, and I decided, standing in the cold with my bucket at my feet, that it did not matter which.