Black and grey realistic cherry blossom branch tattoo spreading across a shoulder and upper back.

Cherry blossom branch on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A branch of cherry blossom with open five-petalled flowers, buds and dark leaves wraps over the shoulder and across the upper back. The petals are softly shaded in grey with fine black stamens and stems, giving a realistic, dimensional effect. The ink is entirely black and grey, and the design fills the frame diagonally with the blossoms in the upper right and left.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Back Cherry blossom Flower Blossom Leaf Branch Bud

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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

Sit closer, the wind off the moor has teeth tonight, and you'll want to hear this before the fire drops. You've all walked past the old cherry tree in the inner ward of Harrowgate, the one that bursts white every April as if the keep had never fallen. My grandmother's grandmother swore it was planted by Lady Isolde the spring her husband rode north and never came back.

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She had a steward called Tobias Quill, who kept the accounts in a cold room above the gatehouse. Every evening he climbed the broken stair to tell her the tally of stores, and every evening she asked him instead what the grey was doing on the far hills. He lied to her, kindly, for three winters. He said the snow was thinning. He said the road was clear. In truth the road was ash and the garrison had gone over to the Sheriff's men.

On the last night of March she sent him down to the orchard with a spade and a jug of wine. 'Dig where the frost lies longest,' she said, 'and bring me what you find.' He dug until his palms bled. Beneath the roots lay a bone box, and inside it a folded letter, not from her husband but from the man who had burned the north road, begging for mercy in a hand as neat as frost on glass.

Tobias carried the letter up the stair and read it aloud, every word, and the lady listened with her eyes closed. When he finished she laughed, a bright unlovely sound, and said, 'Now we know what the blossom is for.' Next morning the tree had opened all at once, a hundred pale faces turned to the walls. Nobody in Harrowgate has ever cut it down, and nobody has ever asked the lady what she meant.