Flash sheet of five designs showing a black stylised glyph decorated with pink cherry blossom, some with green leaves and branches, drawn in a botanical style.

Cherry blossom on a stylised glyph flash sheet

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A sheet of five drawings of the same bold, calligraphic black glyph, each paired with cherry blossom flowers, buds and branches in different arrangements. The glyph has smooth, tapering strokes and solid black fill, while some blossoms are shaded in pink and purple with green leaves and stems. The designs are spaced across a plain white page, with two in full colour, one in pink with green vines, and two in black and white with pink or purple flowers.

Botanical Japanese Cherry blossom Glyph Flower Branch Leaves Bud Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cherry on Gull Holm would not flower until someone asked it to. Everyone on the island knew this, the way they knew the tide tables and which boats leaked. So when Ailsa Corran came up the hill in the second week of April with a flat stone under her arm and her father's chisel tucked in her apron, the old men at the quay did not laugh. They only moved their pipes to the other side of their mouths.

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The stone bore a mark, a tall hooked letter that nobody living could read, cut by a grandmother who had come from further out and never said where. Ailsa had copied it onto paper a hundred times. She set the stone against the trunk, knelt in the wet grass, and asked the tree the old way, speaking the shape aloud one stroke at a time: the long fall of it, the curl at the top like a wave turning over, the tail that loops back on itself.

Nothing happened for the length of a kettle coming to the boil. Then a single bud split at the end of a low branch, and the petals came out pale pink with a darker stripe down the middle, and the rest followed in a rush that smelled of rain. Her mother, who had called it foolishness, was seen at the top of the path with her shawl pulled tight, staring.

Ailsa did not keep the blossom for herself. She cut one branch and carried it down to the harbour, where her father's boat was readying for the first crossing, and tied it to the mast. The boat slid out past the breakwater with the pink bright against the grey sky, and petals trailed behind it on the black water, one after another, until the sea took them.