Back of a woman in a mustard open-back top, with a mirrored cherry blossom branch tattoo across the upper back and a small blossom cluster lower down.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom branches across upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A woman with her back to the camera shows a mirrored pair of cherry blossom branches across her upper back, with pink and red five-petal flowers on dark brown and black stems. A smaller cluster of blossoms sits lower on the centre of her back. The background is a blurred street lined with pink cherry trees and a few people in the distance.

Botanical Back Cherry blossom Branch Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bosun wanted the crate lashed in the lazarette, but Tomas Greer had carried the saplings aboard himself at Yokohama and he would not have them in the dark with the bilge. So they rode on the hatch cover under a tarpaulin, and every morning before the watch changed he went up with a bucket and a tin dipper and gave each root its share of fresh water. Eleven trees, bound for a nursery outside Liverpool where a Mrs Abernethy had paid forty pounds for them and written that she expected them alive.

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Off the Cape the sea came over the rail in a grey wall and took the tarpaulin clean away. When the crate slid, the tallest sapling snapped where its two leading shoots met, and Tomas knelt in the wash with his palms bleeding and his mind made up. He cut a strip from a spare oar, bound the split with marline, and tied the broken limbs together so they would knit as one. 'You'll have a tree with two heads,' the bosun said. 'Then it'll have two of everything,' Tomas said, and went below for the wire.

Somewhere south of the Line the buds opened in the warm dark of the hatch, and the whole ship smelt of a country none of them had seen. The cook's boy swept pink petals off the galley step for a week and swore they were getting into the soup. By the time the Mersey pilot came aboard, the trees were in full flower, and the split one had grown toward itself, two arms reaching across the gap Tomas had bridged with wire.

Mrs Abernethy walked the crate in her good boots and her mouth went tight at the mended tree. 'Ruined,' she said. Tomas borrowed a spade from the carter, dug a hole by the yard wall, and set the split sapling in it with the wire still on. 'It isn't ruined,' he said. 'It's the only one of its kind.' She paid him for the other ten and let him keep the one. Each spring the two boughs meet a little higher over the wall, and nobody on the road has ever asked which half of it was the broken part.