Colour photo of a Japanese style cherry blossom branch tattoo with pink blossoms, black branches and a black kanji character on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom branch with kanji on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a black branch with thick and thin strokes, with pink cherry blossoms in full bloom and several petals falling from it. A black kanji character sits to the right of the branch. The pink petals are softly shaded, while the branch and character are solid black ink, and the design is set against plain skin with a simple, open composition.

Japanese Botanical Forearm Cherry blossom Branch Petal Kanji Flower

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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 petals reach the ferry slip before the boat does, which is how you know the wind has turned. You stand on the harbour wall with your father's tin of brushes under one arm and watch the first pink scraps skate across the wet cobbles and catch in the nets stacked outside the chandler's door.

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Mr Okonedo keeps a cherry tree in a clay pot beside his step, the only thing in Hollin Bay that flowers out of season. He has pruned it for forty years with a knife nobody else is allowed to touch. Each spring he cuts you one branch, wraps it in yesterday's newspaper, and tells you to paint what the wind does rather than what the tree does. Your first attempts were stiff. The petals sat on the paper like coins on a tablecloth.

The winter he didn't open the shop, you carried the pot indoors yourself and set it by the radiator, and you kept the branch in a jam jar on the windowsill. You learned to lay the black stroke in one breath, thick at the root, thinning towards the tip, the way he'd shown you with a single character brushed on the back of an envelope. You painted the character beside the branch on the shop's glass, reversed so it read correctly from the street.

In April the tree came back. You went down with the tin, meaning to paint it properly, and found the wind had already been at work. Petals lay in drifts across the step and stuck to the wet glass, and you left them there, brush dry in your hand, and let the last few drift off the page as they pleased.