Watercolour-style cherry blossom tattoo across the shoulder and upper arm, shown from two angles, with pink flowers, green and blue washes and black ink splatter.

Cherry blossom tattoo on shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows pink cherry blossom flowers on branches, with several buds and a lower cluster of blooms running down the upper arm. Soft linework and loose black ink splatters sit over blurred washes of pink, green and blue, giving a painterly finish. The photo shows the same arm from the back and the side, with the design filling the shoulder and upper arm.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Cherry blossom Flower Petal Bud Branches Ink splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been told the orchard would be stripped by Lady Day, so he worked fast, with the window open and the cold air coming in off the wet lawn. The cherries behind the infirmary had come out all at once that spring, pink as the inside of a shell, and the abbot wanted them on paper before the frost took the last of the buds. Anselm mixed his washes in the chipped saucers he had carried up from the scriptorium, sap green and a thin rose madder, and he did not stop to wipe the brush when it dripped.

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Then the bell for none rang early, and he jumped, and a spatter of black ink flew from his pen across the sheet like a flung handful of gravel. He reached for a rag. Brother Osric, who had come up the stair to complain about the noise, stopped in the doorway and said nothing for a long while.

Anselm waited for the scolding. Instead Osric crossed the room, lifted the drawing from the board, and held it to the light. The blossoms were soft as breath on the paper. The black spatter sat across them like a flock of starlings lifting off a field, and where it fell over the green wash it looked as though the wind had been there.

"Leave that," Osric said. "The sheet is for the chapter house, not the bursar."

So the drawing went to the chapter house and was pinned above the fireplace, and every winter after, when the orchard lay bare and grey, the brothers stood beneath it and argued about whether the ink had been a mistake at all.