Colour tattoo of a cherry blossom branch with pink flowers and a bud, set on a shoulder blade over a soft grey wash.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom branch on a upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a branch with three open pink blossoms and a closed bud, with stamens picked out in fine red and white detail. The petals are shaded smoothly in pinks and mauves, and a soft, painterly wash of grey and purple sits behind the branch. The design is centred on the upper back, running from the shoulder blade towards the spine.

Botanical Realism Back Shoulder Cherry blossom Blossom Branch Flower Bud Petal Stamen

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

The branch rode north on Ruth's knees for four hours, wrapped in a tea towel and wedged in a jam jar that kept slopping onto the seat. Three blossoms had opened by the time the train left Crewe, and a fourth bud sat shut at the tip like a grey pea waiting to be told it was allowed out. Nobody in the carriage asked what it was. A man in a rail fleece offered to hold the jar at Preston and she said no, thank you, she had it.

Keep reading

The flat in Headingley had one window facing a brick wall and a sky the colour of wet newspaper. Ruth had bought watercolours from the market, the sort that came in a tin with a brush that shed, and she spent the first evening trying to paint the branch the way it looked against the sky, which was wrong every time. The petals came out flat. The stamens looked like someone had dropped a handful of pins. Her mother, who had painted every Sunday for forty years in a cardigan, would have told her to stop fussing and wet the paper first.

So she wet the paper. She laid a grey wash behind the branch and let the purple bleed into it while it was still soft, and the petals came up out of the wet as if they had been there all along. By the Friday the bud had opened on the windowsill, and a single petal had come loose and stuck to the glass, pale against the brick.

She pressed it between two pages of an estate agent's brochure and carried the brochure to the bin on Monday, then took it out again and put it in her coat pocket. The branch went back to the garden in the end, planted in the bed by the bins, and she never learned whether it took.