Black and grey realism tattoo of a cherry blossom branch with shaded petals climbing up the outer thigh.

Cherry blossom branch on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A branch of cherry blossom flowers runs diagonally up the outer thigh, with five-petalled blooms, buds and thin twigs. The petals and stems are rendered in smooth black and grey shading with soft highlights and fine dark detail in the stamens. The background is bare skin and a pale wall, with the design filling most of the frame.

Realism Botanical Thigh Cherry blossom Flower Branch Petal Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had carried the branch up from the car park at ten past eleven, wrapped in a folded copy of the Evening Standard, and by midnight it stood in a jam jar on the desk at the end of Ward Nine, where nobody had asked whether it could.

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Night shift taught her to measure time in small things: the drip alarm in bay two, the kettle that clicked itself off, the buds on the twigs that seemed to thicken whenever she looked away. Mrs Dunmore in bay three had asked for it. Her husband had planted the tree in the back garden in Catford the year they married, and the cutting from its lowest limb was the only thing she wanted from home.

At two Nell checked the old woman's pulse and found her awake, watching the jar through the open door. 'They won't open till the warm comes,' Mrs Dunmore said. 'Ours never did before the first week of April.' Nell turned the radiator valve up a notch, which she was not supposed to do, and the room smelled faintly of cold air and scorched dust.

At ten to six, when the windows went grey, one bloom had split along its seam. Its five petals were pale as wet paper, and their edges had a blush so faint you had to lean close to see it. Nell wheeled the jar to the bedside and set it where the old woman could reach, and neither of them said anything about the rest of the buds, which would take their own time.