Black and grey cherry blossoms and falling petals run down the spine, with a shaded lotus and pink water lines at the lower back, in a Japanese style.

Cherry blossom trail and lotus on a back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A woman's bare back shows cherry blossom flowers and loose petals arranged in a rising line down the spine. At the lower back, a shaded lotus flower sits on wavy water lines outlined in pale pink, with fine petal edges and soft grey shading. The composition is centred and the design fills the lower half of the back against a plain light background.

Japanese Botanical Back Cherry blossom Petal Flower Lotus Water Wave Spine Back

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tent went up in Shrewsbury with two pegs short, and nobody had the heart to send to the yard for more. Mr Hale stood at the ring with the ledger under one arm, reading out the takings the way other men read the shipping forecast, flat and without hope. I was sixteen the year the Marvello Brothers took me on to fetch water and mend the net, and I had learned to fall from the high wire the way you learn a card trick, by watching it done wrong a hundred times.

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The drop curtain hung behind the band for as long as anyone could remember. Old Tomasz painted the lotus on black water in 1951, with pink ripples that caught the lamps, and his wife stitched the cherry trail across the top in silk thread that had gone soft as cotton. Every spring they hung it and every autumn they folded it into the cart, and the petals she had sewn always came loose and turned up in the sawdust for weeks after. Mr Hale said it was bad luck to sweep them out. I swept them into my pocket instead.

When the scrap man came with his lorry, he looked at the curtain and offered four pounds for the brass rings alone. I told him no and rolled it up myself, badly, with the lotus on the inside. Then I walked it out past the caravans and down the lane to the village hall, where the vicar's wife had once said they needed something for the stage.

Halfway along the verge, the silk shed its last few petals. By the time I reached the gate there was a line of them lying on the tarmac, pale and spaced out, and I stopped to look back. They went all the way to the field where the tent had been, rising as they went, like someone had left a path for the rest of us to follow.