Colour tattoo of a cherry blossom tree in a Japanese style with black branches, grey wash trunk and pink blossoms, running down the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cherry blossom tree on the ribs

Japanese · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A cherry blossom tree with a dark, grey-washed trunk and thin black branches climbs from the lower side of the torso towards the ribs. Clusters of pink and red blossoms are scattered along the branches, with soft shading on the trunk and petals. The tree is shown diagonally against smooth skin, with a grey top at the upper edge and denim at the bottom.

Japanese Botanical Ribs Cherry blossom Tree Branches Blossom Flower Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dilys had said the cherry tree was in the wrong place for forty years, and on the morning before her granddaughter's wedding she finally let Ruth take the secateurs to it. Ruth stood on the wobbling stepladder at the back wall of the Bramley Road house, her flask of tea going lukewarm on the patio, and worked along the branches that had grown across the kitchen window like handwriting nobody could read.

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The trunk was grey where the rain had washed it, the thin black limbs thick with pink clusters that smelt faintly of almonds when she snapped a spray free. She had expected Dilys to fuss. Instead her mother-in-law sat on the back step with her cardigan buttoned one hole out and said, 'Cut the low one, the one that shades the bench. Ray planted it the spring we moved in, so the bench would have something to look at.' Ruth cut it. The bench had been in the sun for years, and nobody had sat on it since the funeral.

By four o'clock the blossom filled jam jars along the trestle tables in the church hall, and the guests kept pausing to touch the petals as if checking they were real. Nell wore Dilys's pearls and a dress with no sleeves, laughing at the vicar's joke about the bell ringers. Ruth watched her daughter's hand find her new husband's across the aisle and felt something loosen that had been tight since the spring.

When the speeches ended, Dilys pressed a single petal into the hymn book in Ruth's hands. 'Keep that,' she said. 'The tree was never in the wrong place. It was waiting for a reason to bloom where we'd see it.' Outside, the wind lifted the last of the blossom off the gravel path and carried it, pink and loose, over the wall towards the house.