Back tattoo of a shaded grey cherry blossom tree with pink flowers in front of a pale moon, in a Japanese style, with small stars and a kanji character above and to the left.

Cherry blossom tree and moon across a back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows a twisting grey tree trunk with bare branches rising from the lower back and spreading across the shoulder blade. Pink and red cherry blossoms sit on the branches, and a pale moon is framed by soft, smudged grey shading behind the tree. Three black star outlines sit near the neck and upper back, with a single black kanji character on the left shoulder area.

Japanese Botanical Back Cherry blossom Tree Moon Star Kanji Branches Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had stopped counting frosts by the time the council men came up the lane with their saws. They stood at the orchard gate and pointed at the cherry on the top terrace, its trunk twisted like a wrung-out sheet, its bare limbs reaching down the bank as if looking for something dropped. "Dead wood," said the younger one, and he wrote it on his clipboard without looking up.

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Her grandfather had grafted that tree from a sprig a merchant seaman gave him on the Avonmouth quay, wrapped in a handkerchief with instructions: it would flower only when the moon was full, and only for somebody who looked up. He had laughed about that for forty years. Nell had never laughed, but she had looked up every full moon since she was nine, and the tree had never once let her down.

That last night she dragged a kitchen chair up the terrace and sat under it with a flask. The moon rose over Clee Hill, round and pale, smudged by a band of cloud like smoke from a distant fire. Blossom opened along the branches, pink at the edges and red at the heart, and the petals came down in slow handfuls onto the grass, onto her knees, onto the chair's cracked seat.

At seven the saws came up the lane again. The younger man stopped at the gate, boots already sinking in petals, and took off his cap. He didn't say dead wood this time. He asked her, quietly, whether she'd be needing a hand getting the chair down.