Colour tattoo of a cherry blossom tree with pink flowers and brown shaded branches across the upper back and shoulder blade, in a Japanese style.

Cherry blossom tree across upper back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A cherry blossom tree with a twisting trunk and branches spreads from the lower shoulder blade up towards the shoulder. Pink five-petalled flowers, pale buds and red-outlined petals sit along the branches, with brown and grey shading giving the wood depth. The tattoo is shown on a bare back from behind, with the top half of the body and the head cropped out of frame.

Japanese Back Cherry blossom Tree Branch Flower Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cherry at the edge of Hollin Wood had been bent sideways since before the mill burned, its trunk twisting like wet rope wrung by a careless hand. Every spring the village children counted the blossom from the lane and argued about whether it had more than the year before. Nobody cut it down. Old Mary Pell said a tree that grew crooked on purpose had its reasons.

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The year the frost came late, Ellen Ashby went into the wood to fetch a length of ash for a cradle. She found the cherry already in flower, though it was only March, and the petals were drifting down onto the frozen path with no wind to move them. She sat on a root, too tired to walk home, and a low branch lowered itself over her and let a single pink flower fall into her cupped hands.

'What do you want for it?' she asked, because her grandmother had taught her always to ask. The tree said nothing, being a tree, but a bough creaked above her, and she understood it wanted a name. So she gave it the name of the child she had lost in the winter, and by morning the blossom had spread along every branch, five petals to each flower, until the whole hillside looked like a torn sleeve of light.

When the village woke, the ash lay cut and stacked on the path, and beside it sat a bud no bigger than a thumbnail. Tom Ashby planted it in the garden that summer. It flowered every March after, and no one ever asked it for anything again, which is why the children still count the blossom and never agree.