Watercolour-style cherry blossom branch tattoo in pink and black with grey-teal wash, running down the ribs and side of the torso.

Cherry blossom branch on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A branch of cherry blossom runs diagonally from the upper side of the torso down towards the hip, with pink five-petalled flowers, small buds and thin black stems. The linework is loose and sketchy, with soft pink and grey-teal washes blended behind the petals to give a watercolour effect. The photograph is taken close up from the side, with the tattoo filling most of the frame and the top of low-rise denim visible at the bottom.

Botanical Ribs Cherry blossom Branch Flower Petal Bud Stem

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 oven timer had gone off twice before Ruth noticed the light changing in the window above the sink. Four in the morning in March still felt like the middle of the night, but the flour sacks were stacked and the first tray of rye was cooling on the rack. I was the only one in the kitchen who did not mind the cold tiles.

Keep reading

My father kept a sketchbook of trees he had seen from train windows. Pages of cherry trees in the parks around Hull, each drawn in a hurry, the blossom no more than blots of wash. He said blossom was the only thing worth looking at for a week a year, and then it was gone. I thought about that while I piped sugar-paste petals onto almond buns for the Saturday market, five to a bun, pressing a wooden skewer into each centre so they looked as if they had dropped there by accident.

Ruth asked why I bothered with the pink wash when nobody would look that closely. I said customers looked at the colour first, then forgot to be hungry, then bought two. She laughed and told me to stop being a painter. I did not tell her I had been practising the branch on the back of an invoice pad since January, one stroke of grey-teal behind each flower so the pink seemed to lift off the paper.

By six the buns were on slate in the window, and the sun came up over the Humber in a long wet smear. Ruth wiped her hands on her apron and pointed at the glass. A petal had caught on the outside of the pane, stuck there by the damp, pale and five-lobed, as if someone had walked past and left it. I left it where it was. It would be gone by lunchtime.