Hand-drawn design of two cherry blossom sprigs with scattered petals, in pink wash and dark red linework on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom sprigs and falling petals

Botanical · Colour · Flash

The drawing shows two cherry blossom flowers on thin curved stems with dark red tips, plus three loose petals drifting between them. The outlines are sketchy and varied in weight, and the petals are filled with soft pink wash that deepens toward the centres. The composition is open, with the elements spread diagonally across a plain white background.

Botanical Cherry blossom Flower Petal Stem Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, and mind the crumbs, because I will not tell this twice before the bell. The old cherry stands against the cloister wall, where Brother Anselm planted it the winter the north roof fell in. Every spring it puts out blossom faster than anyone can sweep, and every spring the Prior counts the petals as if they were coins.

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The year the snow came early, the Prior sent for the saw. Timber was dear, and a cherry makes fine boards, he said, pale and close-grained. Brother Oswin took the order out to the garden with his shoulders hunched, and found the novice Hild already up the trunk with a bucket of sand and a length of red cord, tying every sprig she could reach to the lower branches.

What are you doing, child? he asked. Keeping them from the saw, she said, because a branch that is tied down cannot be cut without the whole limb coming with it. Oswin laughed until he had to sit on the edge of the well. Then he went back to the Prior and told him the tree was too tangled to fell before Lent, and that the sawyers would have to bring their own ladders.

Hild never did get the cords untied. By Lent the petals had come down across the cloister in a pink drift, and the Prior, walking the path in his slippers, stopped to lift one that had settled on his sleeve. He carried it to the chapter house and laid it on the ledger, and there it stayed, pressed flat beside the sum of the tree's worth, which he wrote down as beyond measure.