Cherry blossom branch with pink flowers, falling petals and a black and grey butterfly tattooed on the side of a thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom branch and butterfly on thigh

Japanese · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a thin branch with pink cherry blossoms and several petals drifting downwards, with a black and grey butterfly at the top. The branch and butterfly are shaded with soft grey tones, while the blossoms are filled with pink and red-pink colour. The design wraps diagonally across the side of the thigh against plain skin.

Japanese Botanical Thigh Cherry blossom Butterfly Branch Petal Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cherry tree had pushed its roots under the chapel flagstones the spring after the roof came down, and by the time I was twelve it was lifting the altar step like a loose tooth. Nobody at Greyhollow Castle had planted it. Old Mrs Pryce, who kept the gatehouse keys, said it had grown from a stone dropped by a soldier in 1944, though she told the story differently each time I asked.

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Every April the blossom came out before the leaves, pale pink on black branches, and the petals blew across the outer ward and caught in the arrow slits. My job that spring was to sweep them off the wall walk before the visitors arrived, the ones who paid four pounds to climb the steps and photograph the view of the estuary. I swept them into sacks, my father carried the sacks to the compost heap behind the stables, and I never once thought of them as anything but a nuisance.

The butterfly came on the last Sunday of the month. It was a dark one with grey-washed wings, the kind people mistake for a moth until it opens. It settled on the broken rim of the well and stayed while I ate my sandwich. Mrs Pryce saw it from the gate and said it was the tree's bargain: the castle would stand as long as someone swept the petals up. I laughed, then realised she was not joking, and that she had been sweeping them herself for forty years.

When the council sold the site in June, I took one branch home in a bucket of wet newspaper. It had three blossoms left and a bud that never opened. I pressed it between the pages of the castle guidebook. The butterfly, which I had not expected to follow me down the lane, lifted from the gatehouse wall and flew ahead of the van all the way to the main road.