Back tattoo of a red cherry blossom branch running from the shoulder down the spine and onto the upper arm, with dark branches and soft shading.

Cherry blossom branch down a back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A woman with dark hair, both hands raised to her head, stands with her back to the camera. The tattoo is a cherry blossom branch that sweeps from the upper arm over the shoulder blade and down towards the hip, following the curve of the spine. Red and pink blossoms sit on dark grey branches, with soft tonal shading and fine detail on the flowers against a pale background.

Botanical Japanese Back Shoulder Upper arm Cherry blossom Branch Flower Spine Leaves Red flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The branch came off the ferry in March, wrapped in wet sacking, and my uncle swore it was dead. Nobody in Porthkennick had ever seen a cherry tree on the quay. Salt doesn't suit blossom, everyone said, and the fish market already smelled of diesel and gulls, so what would a tree from a Yokohama nursery want with us?

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I was nineteen and paid to sweep the quay before the lorries came. Captain Okada, who had sailed the coastal runs for thirty years before his knees gave out, arrived each morning with a flask of green tea and a tin of brushes. He cut the grey limbs at the angle the prevailing wind would take them, then sketched the whole shape on the back of a tide table. The blossom, he said, should be the colour of a float at first light, red at the heart and paler towards the tips where the sun gets to it first.

We planted it in the lee of the lifeboat shed and watered it from buckets. Through April it did nothing. Gulls sat on the bare wood and I stopped checking. Then one morning, after a storm had taken half the nets off the slipway, I found the whole tree open overnight, petals lying in the scuppers of the moored boats like spilled coins.

Okada came down with his flask, looked at it for a long time, and didn't say a word. He pressed a single petal into the pocket of my oilskin, then went back up the hill to his knees and his tea. I still have that petal, dried flat between the pages of the tide table, and every March I take it out and check the weather.