Colour tattoo of a cherry blossom branch with pink flowers and green leaves running up the side of the ribs.

Cherry blossom branch on a side ribcage

Japanese · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A cherry blossom branch with pink five-petalled flowers, buds, green leaves and falling petals curves up the side of the torso. The branch and petals are shaded in grey and black, with soft pink and red fills on the blossoms and a light outline. Grey ink wash marks sit around the branch, and the photo is taken from the side against a plain background with a brick wall.

Japanese Botanical Ribs Cherry blossom Branch Flower Petal Bud Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry from Tanegashima had been gone two days when Mitsue Hara found the old sea captain's logbook under the wet rice sacks in the hold. Nobody had opened it since the war. She carried it up to the bow where the wind could turn its pages, and read aloud to the gulls, because there was nobody else on the boat who would listen.

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The captain had sailed a cherry-wood barque that carried blossom branches to the mainland every spring, wrapped in damp cloth so they would not drop their petals before the markets. Each entry recorded the weather, the tides, and the number of petals lost overboard. He wrote that the sea took more than it gave, and that the only fair trade was to give the sea one perfect flower for every branch it had let him keep. On the last page, in a shakier hand, he had drawn a small branch and written beneath it: bring one back to the island.

Mitsue closed the book and went down to the galley, where the cook was sharpening a knife. She asked him for a pink flower, any pink flower, and he laughed and gave her a ripe plum. She went out again and tossed it into the grey swell. The gulls scattered. A single cherry petal drifted down from nowhere, turned once in the air, and settled on the rail beside her hand.

She did not know whether the captain had meant it as a promise or a warning. She kept the petal in the logbook, between the last two pages, and when the island came up green on the horizon she walked off the ferry with the branch of her own life held carefully in both hands.