Colour tattoo of a cherry blossom branch with pink flowers and a bird with a red throat, plus two small characters, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom branch and bird across upper back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A branch of pink and red cherry blossoms curves across the upper back, with a small bird with grey and black wings and a red throat feeding at the left end of the branch. The branch and bird are outlined in dark grey or black with soft shading, while the flowers use rich pink and red tones with lighter highlights. Two black characters sit near the right edge of the design, and the composition follows the line of the shoulder blade.

Japanese Botanical Back Cherry blossom Branch Bird Flower Character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The guard at the upper bridge had already stamped the pass when the little bird landed on the rail, red at the throat and smelling of the orchards on the far bank. Nobody looked up except Marta, who had tucked a sprig of blossom into her collar that morning and saw at once that the bird wanted it.

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Her brother had gone over the border in spring to work the cherry terraces above Lantern Hill, and no letter had come back. The men with the ledgers at the bridge did not pass paper that was not salt or timber. So Marta folded one word, the word for household, small enough to sit in the hollow of a stem, and tied it under the blossom. The bird took the sprig in its beak and rose over the water, where the sentries could not follow it for the glare off the river.

It was gone before the second bell. Marta notched the post by her door each morning after that. On the ninth day a petal came down on her step, pressed flat, with a thread of paper knotted to its stalk and two careful strokes of ink on the back that were not blossom at all.

She did not need to read the rest. She knew the hand. She pinned the petal to her collar, shouldered the salt sacks, and walked to the bridge with the bird's red throat still bright in her mind, counting out the coins for the crossing.