Realistic peach and grey cherry blossom flowers and buds tattooed across a shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom sleeve on upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

Three open cherry blossom flowers and several closed buds sit on a branch that wraps over the shoulder and upper arm. The petals are shaded with soft gradients and fine detail on the stamens, and the blossoms are set against blurred grey and black shading that adds depth. The palette is mainly muted peach and pink with greys, and the flowers fill the frame.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Cherry blossom Flower Blossom Bud Branch Stamen Petal

Find an artist for this

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 blossom came down the Trent in the second week of April, when the water ran brown and fast under the lock gates and nobody on the barge expected anything good to float past. Old Bess Tanner saw it first, a pale pink scatter turning on the current, and she called her grandson up from the cabin to look.

Keep reading

Her husband had cut the cherry tree at the bend above Fenny Lock the winter before, because its roots were lifting the towpath and the parish council had written twice. He had sold the wood to a joiner in Stoke. Bess had told him not to. She said the tree would come back if it was left alone, and he laughed and said trees did not come back from anything, least of all a saw.

The boy fished a sprig from the eddy with the boathook. Five open flowers, their stamens bristling gold-brown like the frayed ends of a rope, and three buds still tight and shut. He held it up against the grey sky the way you hold a letter to the lamp. Bess took it and pressed it between the damp pages of the almanac, where the lock-keeper's wife had once kept her receipts.

That evening the barge moored below the stump, and in the morning there was a green shoot at the cut. By the time they reached Trentham the buds had opened all along the branch. Bess never said she had been right. She only told the boy to mind the flowers in the almanac, and not to lend the book to the joiner.