Colour tattoo of pink cherry blossom flowers on dark branches, wrapping up the ankle and lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom branch on an ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a dark, twisting branch with several pink five-petalled blossoms, two of them large and open, with yellow centres. Loose petals drift down the lower part of the design. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with soft shading on the flowers and a pale teal wash behind the blooms. The design runs diagonally up the skin of the ankle and lower leg.

Botanical Ankle Cherry blossom Flower Branch Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been driving since Barstow with the window down and the radio dead, and somewhere past the turn for Amboy the wind starts bringing petals. Pink ones, flat as coins, skidding across the tarmac as if they have somewhere to be. You assume a lorry has shed a load. Then you see the tree.

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It stands alone beside a cattle grid, a twisted thing with black bark, bare for miles of nothing, and it is in full bloom. Five petals to each flower, a yellow dot at every heart. Someone has knotted a strip of blue cloth to the lowest limb, and that cloth is the only other colour for fifty miles. You pull onto the verge. The gravel ticks under the wheels as you cut the engine.

A woman in a canvas coat is kneeling at the trunk, pressing fallen petals into a tin lid. She does not look up. "They only open for a week," she says. "The rest of the year it's just a stick arguing with the sun." You ask why she bothers gathering them. She shrugs and says her husband planted it the spring the water tower in Kelso went dry, and he promised her it would bloom wherever she happened to be standing when she needed it to.

She holds out one petal, papery and warm from her palm. Take it to the coast, she says, and drop it in the first water you reach. You laugh and tell her you're not from here. She only smiles. When you climb back in and look in the mirror, the road behind you is strewn with pink, and the petals are still coming, drifting up the highway towards you rather than away.