Realistic cherry blossom tree tattoo with pink flowers and a shaded grey trunk spanning a person's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom tree across the back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large cherry blossom tree covers the back, with its trunk curving from the lower right up towards the upper left. The trunk and branches are rendered in black and grey with soft shading, while the blossoms are filled in with pink and red tones and scattered petals fall across the skin. The composition is cropped at the shoulders and hips, with the tree filling most of the frame against a dark background.

Botanical Realism Back Cherry blossom Tree Branch Petal Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at Dover does not look up from his screen when you set the sacking on the steel table. He says, 'Plants?' and you say yes, a cutting, two cuttings, a grafted sapling from your aunt's garden outside Osaka, which is almost true. The damp cloth has gone the colour of weak tea and the roots smell of wet earth. He lifts one corner anyway. Pale pink blossom, a few flowers still holding on in February as if they have forgotten the calendar.

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Your aunt told you the tree was older than the house, that it had leaned over the garden wall so long the wall had given way to it. She said cherries do not like to be moved, that a tree wants to stay where its trunk has learned to bend. You nodded and packed it anyway, wrapped in newspaper, a sleeve of wet moss bound tight around the graft.

He asks what it is for. You tell him the truth: that you want one low branch to reach out over a window in a rented flat in Leeds, where the light comes in sideways at four in the afternoon. He prints a form. Stamp, stamp. He says there should be a phytosanitary paper, and you feel the old drop in your stomach, the one that arrives whenever a rule is standing between you and something you have already decided to carry.

He studies the trunk for a long moment, the dark bark rubbed raw where you tied it to the cane. Then he says, 'Keep it out of the sun, then.' He tears the form in half and hands you the bottom piece, the one with nothing printed on it. Outside, the petals on the sacking lift in the car park wind, and you carry the tree back into the grey with the blossoms coming loose one by one behind you.