Pink origami bird patterned with white cherry blossoms, outlined in black, with pink and purple watercolour-style splashes beside it on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Origami bird with cherry blossoms on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A folded paper bird in pink paper printed with white cherry blossoms sits on the upper arm, with its wing and tail folds shaded in white and edged with black outlines. Soft pink and purple splashes spread around the bird in a watercolour effect. The ink is mainly bright colour, and the bird is centred on the arm with the splashes filling the space to its left.

Japanese Botanical Upper arm Origami Bird Cherry blossom Paper Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind up here takes half of what I say and hands back the wrong half. You want to hear about the bird? Everyone wants the bird. Hana's grandmother folded it at the inn door in Kurai, from the last sheet of pink paper she had kept since the cherry trees dropped their blossom into the river, while the snow came sideways over the pass. Her letter was inside it, folded so tight that a guard would have to tear the wings off to read a word.

Keep reading

Hana was twelve and had been sent over the mountain with it, a day's walk through snow to the knee. Halfway up, the wind found the gap in her collar and tugged at her like a dog wanting a stick. At the summit she held the bird out over the drop to warm her fingers, and a gust took it from her hand and set it turning down into the white. She went after it down the scree on her backside, shouting words her grandmother would have slapped her for, and found it wedged against a stone shrine, one wing still dry, the blossoms as bright as the day they were printed.

The magistrate in the valley town had been expecting nothing from anyone. He held the bird on his palm for a long time, turning it slowly, and then he laughed until he coughed.

He unpicked the folds one by one with a clerk's knife, and the paper gave up its single line in the grandmother's hand: Come down before the pass closes, you stubborn old man. He read it twice, then pinned the empty bird above his desk, where it stayed through the thaw, and where, the clerks say, the blossoms never faded.