Small fine line cherry blossom tree tattoo with pink blossom on the upper arm, just above the elbow.

Cherry blossom tree on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A small tree with a bare black trunk and branching limbs is drawn in fine line, with soft pink washes of blossom clustered across the upper branches. The shading is light and airy, with the pink fading into the skin in places. The tattoo sits alone on a pale upper arm against a plain grey background, with a maroon sleeve at the edge of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Cherry blossom Tree Branches Blossom

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind up here takes half of what I say and gives it to the goats. You want the tree. Everyone wants the tree. Fine. Between the two shoulders of the pass, where the road gives up and becomes a goat track, there was one cherry, bent flat by the winters like a man ducking under a lintel that is no longer there.

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Nobody planted it. The muleteers say a salt merchant dropped a stone with a seed lodged in its crack, and the stone took. I say it was the snow that planted it, because snow carries things up from the lowlands that have no business being so high. Whatever the truth, it grew stubborn and black-limbed, and for all the years I have walked this road it has bloomed for exactly one week, and never a day longer.

The spring my uncle Teodor came over with the last caravan before the pass shut, the blossom was out and the whole slope looked as though someone had spilt wine across the snow. He had a sack of salt on his back and a debt he had not confessed to anyone. He stopped beneath the branches, the petals came down on his shoulders, and he laughed, the way a man laughs when a weight he has carried too long suddenly shifts.

He left the salt where it lay and walked back down to the village with nothing on his back, and he sold his boots to settle what he owed. Some say the tree was the reason. I say the petals were still caught in his collar when he reached his door, and his wife found them there in the morning and pressed them into the family Bible, where, I am told, they are still.