Cherry blossom branch tattoo on the ribs, with a grey shaded trunk and pink and purple blossoms in a soft botanical style.

Cherry blossom branch on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A grey and black branch curves up the side of the torso, with clusters of pink and purple cherry blossoms along its length. The trunk and twigs are shaded with soft ink wash, while the flowers are lighter and more colourful. The branch runs diagonally across the ribcage, and the blossoms are spaced to balance the composition around the navel.

Botanical Japanese Ribs Cherry blossom Branch Blossom Twig Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cherry tree at Hollin Farm had not flowered in eleven years, and Aunt Dot swore it was sulking because nobody had married beneath it since the Coronation. So when my cousin Pip announced she wanted her wedding in the orchard in March, the whole family treated it as a dare. I spent the week before the ceremony up a stepladder with a bucket of warm water, scrubbing green lichen from the trunk and apologising to the branches, which Dot said was the only way to get anything out of a tree.

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On the morning of the wedding the branches were bare, grey and crooked as a coat hanger. Pip's mum wept over the seating plan. The vicar, who had driven past that orchard for thirty years, said the sap was not moving. I climbed the ladder one last time with a flask of tea and found, low on the north side where the bark had split, a single bud the colour of a fingernail.

I told nobody. I sat on the garden wall with my tea and waited, and the wind swung round to the south and brought the smell of wet earth from the lane. By the time the guests arrived, blossoms had opened along the lower limbs, pale at the rims and deeper purple at the throat, and the rest followed like someone reading a list aloud. Pip cried, properly this time. Dot said she had always known.

Afterwards, when the marquee was folded and the lanterns were stacked in the barn, I climbed up once more and pressed one petal inside the family Bible, at the page where our names are written. It is still there. The tree has flowered every spring since, though Dot insists it only does it for people who ask nicely.