Colour tattoo of a cherry blossom branch with pink flowers and buds wrapping up the inside of a forearm, shown in a realistic style.

Cherry blossom branch on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A branch of pink cherry blossom runs diagonally up the inner forearm, with open five-petalled flowers, closed buds and dark thin twigs. The petals are shaded softly with pale pink highlights and deeper rose tones, giving them a realistic, slightly translucent look. The design fades out towards the top of the arm and the wrist area, with the flowers clustered most densely near the middle of the forearm.

Realism Botanical Forearm Cherry blossom Flower Branch Bud Petal

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your chair in, love, the kettle's only just gone off and the canal's still making that noise it makes after rain. You've come about the tree? Everybody comes about the tree. Agnes Tallis kept it on her sill above Brackley Lock, a cherry in a chipped glazed pot, grafted from a nursery that shut the same year her husband did. Every April she counted the buds the way other women counted rent.

Keep reading

One night, with the streetlamps buzzing and the lock gates groaning, a boatyard lad called Dev knocked on her door. His sister was marrying at St Clement's the next morning and he wanted a branch for her bouquet. Agnes said no. He stood on the step in his oil-stained jacket and said nothing else, just looked past her at the pot in the window. So she took the bread knife, cut a single branch with eleven buds and four open flowers, and wrapped the cut end in a damp tea towel.

Here's the bit people leave out. She made him promise to come back and tell her how it went. He did, two years later, with a wedding photograph and a flower pressed flat in a hymn book. The bride had held one just like it in her fist all through the vows. The tree had lost half its blossom by then, and Agnes had stopped counting.

She kept one more branch for herself, she says, and rubs her thumb along the chipped rim. The petals went down into the black water that night, one after another, drifting under the footbridge towards the weir, and she watched them go until the lamps went out along the towpath. Mind your cup. It's hot.