Colour Japanese-style cherry blossom branch tattoo with red blossoms, a black sun and flying birds, running from the ankle up the lower leg.

Cherry blossom branch and sun on an ankle

Japanese · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A cherry blossom branch winds up the leg from the ankle, with red five-petalled flowers clustered along black and grey limbs. A solid black sun silhouette sits to the right of the branch, with a small flock of black birds above it. The branch is shaded in soft greys for depth, while the blossoms are filled with flat red and yellow centres against the skin tone.

Japanese Botanical Ankle Calf Cherry blossom Branch Sun Bird Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tamsin had been grafting for eleven days when the sun went out over the eastern ridge of Hollin Deep, which was not a sun at all but the reactor lamp the colony called that because nobody had the heart to call it anything else. Dust hung in the dome like lint. She knelt in the seedhouse with a bone knife and a wax pot, cutting a scion from the last living branch of the old cherry, the one Grandmother Ysolde had carried in a crate through three sleeps of cold.

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The branch was black with age along its bark, grey where the lichen had given up, and every spur still bore flowers that were not really red anymore but the colour of a bruise going yellow at the edge. Tamsin pressed the cut end to the rootstock. Her hands did not shake. They had been steady since the first winter, when the vats failed and she learned that steadiness was the only thing a grafter owned outright.

Outside, the transport bay was loading. Eleven birds had come down onto the gantry rail that morning, the first in forty years, black against the dust, and everyone had gone quiet and then gone back to work, because birds were a sign for people who had time to read signs. Tamsin had counted them through the glass. Eleven, lifting off toward the ridge.

She bound the graft with strips of waxed cloth and wrote the date on a tag: the day the flock left. Then she carried the young tree to the cart herself, so it would arrive upright, facing the window, toward whatever light the new world had.