Colour tattoo of pink cherry blossom branches and a purple butterfly running from the ribs across the side of the abdomen, in a Japanese style.

Cherry blossom branch and butterfly on ribs and hip

Japanese · Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows black branches bearing pink and red cherry blossom flowers and buds, with a large purple butterfly with shaded wings near the lower side of the torso. The branches curve from the upper ribs down towards the hip, with a single loose pink petal falling beside the upper branch. The flowers and butterfly are shaded in multiple tones of pink, red and purple against the skin, with bold black linework for the stems, and the composition wraps around the side of the body beside the navel.

Japanese Botanical Ribs Cherry blossom Branch Flower Bud Petal Butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boarding house at Polwenna had nine rooms, and the top one was kept locked. Mrs Tregenza wore its key on a green ribbon round her wrist, and when the summer lodgers asked why the window was never shut, she only said that a butterfly had come in off the sea years back and had not been asked to leave.

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Her grandson Jory was the one who went up. He was eleven and had no fear of stairs, and one wet afternoon in June he took the key while she dozed in her chair. The room smelled of salt and of something sweeter. On the washstand stood a stone jar of cherry blossom, pink as the inside of a shell, and on the highest twig sat a great purple butterfly, its wings shaded dark at the edges, opening and closing slow as breathing.

He did not touch it. He stood there until his legs ached, then remembered what his grandmother had told him about the sailor who planted the tree in the yard. Ansel Penhale had gone out to the Newfoundland banks and never come home, and his wife Morwenna had kept that window open every spring so that whatever came back from the water would find its way in. She died still waiting. The tree bloomed on regardless, and so, it seemed, did the butterfly.

Jory lifted the sash as far as it would go. The butterfly rose, circled the jar once, and went out over the harbour wall, and a single petal came loose and drifted down onto the sill. He put it in his pocket. The window stayed open all that summer, and the petal stayed in his pocket long after it had lost its colour.