Colour tattoo of a pink cherry blossom branch and a teal butterfly across the ribs and side of the torso.

Cherry blossom tree and butterfly on ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A tree with a dark trunk and branches rises up the side of the torso, covered in pink and red cherry blossoms with soft shading between the petals. A teal butterfly with detailed wing veins sits to the left of the branches. The colour is bold and blended, and the tattoo fills the frame against the skin of the side body, with a white shirt pulled up at the top edge and denim at the bottom.

Botanical Ribs Cherry blossom Tree Branch Flower Butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had taken the lower orchard in the night, and Nell walked the rows before breakfast with a clipboard she never wrote on. Every cherry tree that had flowered too early was blackened at the tips, the petals gone brown and curled like burnt paper. Her grandfather would not come out until the sun cleared the hop poles. He said a tree could forgive a frost but not a fuss.

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She found him at the far wall, grafting a fresh scion onto the old Morello stock his father had planted. The knife was steady in his hands. "It's taken," he said, pressing wax over the join, "if we're lucky." She wanted to tell him about the crate in the shed with the glasshouse label from Ashford, and the pupae she had ordered for the school, which had hatched three days early into a kitchen full of teal wings.

That morning one had settled on the branch above the graft, opening and closing its wings slowly, as if it were deciding something. Nell watched it the whole time her grandfather worked. When he finally stood up and saw it, he laughed, a rusty sound she had not heard since March. "Out of season, like the rest of us," he said. She lifted her hand, and the butterfly lifted with it, up over the wall and into the hedge.

By noon the grafted branch had put out three buds, not white but a faint pink at the tips. Her grandfather pressed one with his thumb and nodded. "We'll cut the frosted wood in autumn," he said. "The rest we keep." Nell took the clipboard back to the house and, for the first time all morning, wrote something on it.