Colour tattoo of a black branch with pink cherry blossoms and black Japanese characters beside it, in a Japanese style, on the back.

Cherry blossom branch with kanji

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A black branch curves diagonally across the skin, with pink cherry blossom flowers and buds along its length. Several black Japanese characters sit to the right of the branch, written in a brush-like hand. The branch has bold dark lines and soft grey shading, while the blossoms are filled with flat pink tones and light shading, and the background is plain skin.

Japanese Botanical Back Cherry blossom Branch Flower Bud Kanji Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third step, it gives under you, always has. Sit by the stove where the draught can't reach your neck. You want the story of Mr Hayashi and the radio, do you? Then you'll have to hear about the jam jar first, because that's where it all starts.

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He came out to the Skerrow light in the spring of 1951 with one tin trunk and a paper parcel tied in string. Inside was a branch cut from a tree behind a station in Yokohama, wrapped in wet rag. He stood it in a jam jar on the signal table, right beside the set, and the keeper's wife said it was the only thing on the rock that smelled of anything but paraffin. Nobody asked him to move it.

Every night he sat with the headphones clamped to his ears, taking the shipping reports and the weather from the mainland, and when the fog came down thick as wool he sent each warning twice, because the second time the boats always answered. A radio man, he told the keeper, is only a guardian for words other people need. Guard them well and keep yourself out of the road.

The blossom opened that April, and the same week a Grimsby trawler vanished into fog off the reef. Hayashi kept the set humming for nineteen hours, and the boat came home following nothing but his voice. When they took him off the rock that autumn, he left the jam jar behind. The petals he'd dried are in the tin under that stove, if you care to look.