Black and grey realistic cherry blossom tattoo with leaves and branches covering a woman's shoulder and upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom tattoo across a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows cherry blossom flowers, buds and branches with dark leaves spreading across the shoulder blade and onto the upper arm. The blossoms are rendered in soft grey shading with fine detail in the stamens, while the leaves and twigs use darker, heavier tones for contrast. The photograph is taken from behind at an angle, with the tattoo filling most of the frame and the subject's face out of view.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Back Cherry blossom Flower Branch Leaves Bud

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 high street in the second week of April, which was late for it, and Margaret Osei swore the wind had carried it across the river from the orchard at Little Hadley just to annoy the stallholders. She was pinning a tarpaulin to the frame of her fruit stall when the first petals hit the wet cobbles and stuck there like confetti nobody had cleared up after a wedding. Rain had been falling since dawn, the thin grey kind that never quite soaks you but never quite stops either, and the market smelled of diesel, damp sprouts and the sweet rot of windfall plums.

Keep reading

Her nephew Tomas came round the corner with two cardboard trays of cut stems, the branches heavy with white flowers that had been forced in a shed behind the church. He was seventeen and treated everything as a bargain he had personally negotiated. "Forty pence each, the lady said. Forty. I told her they'd be gone by Saturday anyway." He set them on the trestle without looking at her, the way he did when he wanted something from her and did not know how to ask.

She took one stem and turned it under the lamp. The shadows of the blossoms lay across the wet wood like pencil work, soft and grey, with the dark knots of the twigs cutting through them. Her own mother had kept a branch like this in a jam jar on the windowsill of their terrace until the petals browned and fell, and had never once explained why. Margaret ran a thumb along the stamens, tiny and precise, and found she did not need an explanation. "Put the kettle on in the van," she said. "We'll sell these to the people who don't know they've missed spring."

By four o'clock the trays were empty and the rain had thinned to nothing. Tomas counted the coins twice, frowning, then pushed the last stem into her hand. "Keep that one," he said. "It's the best of them." She held it up against the fading light, the white blooms gone silver at the edges, and carried it home past the closed shutters, petals dropping one by one behind her.