Red cherry blossom branch tattoo with black linework curving across the side of the ribs, with a hand resting on the skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom branch on the ribs

Japanese · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A branch with black stems and sprays of red five-petalled blossoms runs diagonally down the side of the ribcage, from the upper ribs towards the lower waist. The black lines are bold and tapering, while the blossoms are solid red fills with little shading. The red and black sit on a plain brown background, and a hand rests against the skin on the left of the frame.

Japanese Botanical Ribs Cherry blossom Branch Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had come early that year, and Marit's father would not let anyone cross the Ninefold Col after the first week of autumn. She went anyway, with a cloth bundle on her back and a knife in her belt. On the north side of the pass grew one tree that had never been cut, and her mother had told her it flowered in the dead of winter if someone asked it properly.

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She found the tree where the wind turned. Its trunk was black with rain and its branches were bare, though the stems were still green at the tips. She sat with her back against it until her fingers went stiff. Then she said what her mother had told her to say, which was only her own name and the name of the village below, and she waited.

Nothing happened for a long time. Then one twig split at the joint and a single blossom opened, red as a coal, and then another, all the way along a branch that had no business being green. Marit broke it off at the base and wrapped it inside her coat against her ribs, where the warmth would keep it.

She walked down through the drifts with the petals pressing on her side. When she reached the lower huts her father was standing at the gate with a lamp. He did not ask where she had been. He only looked at the branch, then at the snow, and said that the salt could wait until spring. The blossoms stayed on the lintel of their door until the thaw, and when the last of them fell, the ground beneath was red for a day.