Colour tattoo of a pink cherry blossom branch with a soft painterly background across a person's upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom branch on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A branch of pink cherry blossom flowers runs diagonally across the upper arm and onto the shoulder, with petals and small buds in varying sizes. The flowers use soft, blended shading in pinks, reds and yellow-greens, with brighter highlights and darker tones giving depth. The loose wash of pink and olive behind the blossoms fades into the skin, giving the piece a painterly, watercolour feel.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Cherry blossom Branch Flower Petal Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The branch came wrapped in a wet tea towel, held upright on the passenger seat of a dusty estate car that smelled of oranges and hot vinyl. When the driver climbed out at my pumps he cradled it like a lamp in a procession. I told him we sold petrol, not gardens. He said the tree it came from stood on the edge of a town two hundred miles back, and it had flowered for one week in the last thirty years.

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Out past the last windbreak the road ran so straight you felt you were standing still. I filled his tank from the old pump with the sticking wheel, and while the numbers climbed he told me about a yard behind a bungalow on Quarry Road, where a grafted tree had leaned against a brick wall for forty years, pink for a week each spring and bare the rest. The new owners had cut it down for a patio. He had got the last shoot off a builder in exchange for a crate of beer.

I knew that wall. I had climbed it at nine to reach the first blossom, and my father had stood at the sink the spring I left, blaming the onions for his eyes. The man kept glancing at me the way people look at something they have taken by accident. I didn't tell him. I filled a jerrycan from the tap at the back and wedged the branch upright in the cab so the petals wouldn't bruise.

When his tail-lights shrank to a red needle on the road, I looked back at the forecourt. A few petals had come loose and were skating across the concrete, pink on grey, pushed by the wind toward the bins. I counted them until I lost count, then went inside to put the kettle on.