Pink cherry blossom branch tattoo with black outlines wrapping over the shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom branch on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A branch of cherry blossom runs across the shoulder and upper arm, with open pink flowers, closed buds and drifting petals. The flowers are outlined in black with soft pink shading and light highlights, while the twigs are rendered in grey-brown tones. The design wraps from the top of the shoulder down the outside of the arm, with petals scattered around its edges.

Botanical Japanese Shoulder Upper arm Cherry blossom Branch Flower Petal Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The petals had been coming off the Kentish tree since Tuesday, and by Thursday the lawn looked as if someone had spilt a box of confetti and given up. Your mother would have swept them. You stand at the kitchen window with a mug going cold and watch the neighbour's boy try to catch one on his tongue, the way you once did, and you don't go out to stop him.

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The tree was planted the year the house changed hands, a whip of a thing in a black bucket that your father swore would never flower. He was wrong about that, and about most things he said with his hands in his pockets. Every spring after, he stood under it with one palm flat against the trunk, as if taking its pulse. You used to think he was talking to it. Later you understood he was counting buds, and that the count told him whether the summer would be kind.

On the Sunday you finally climb the stepladder with the secateurs, meaning to cut back the low branch that drags across the path. The wood is grey-brown and close-grained, and the blossom sits on it in clusters, some open and some still tight as fists. You take a single closed bud between finger and thumb and it won't come away. You leave the branch alone. Down on the grass a dozen petals lie in a loose trail, pale at the edges, pink at the heart, each one already browning where the rain reached it.

You fetch the notebook from the drawer, the one with his handwriting on the inside cover, and under his last entry you write the date and the single word open. Then you go back out and let the petals settle where they fall.