Red and black plum blossom branch tattoo with a red square seal stamp on the left side of a person's ribs, in a Japanese-influenced botanical style.

Plum blossom branch and seal on ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A branch of red plum blossoms with thin black twigs curves diagonally up the side of the ribs, with small red dots scattered around the flowers. A red square seal bearing characters sits below the branch to the right. The ink is mostly red for the blossoms and seal, with soft black linework for the branch, and the subject is set against a dark background with a grey top and navy skirt at the edges.

Botanical Japanese Ribs Branch Flower Character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mitsuko sat under the shop's single bulb, cutting characters backwards into a block of vermilion stone, the chisel ticking like a clock. Outside, the rain had stopped on the canal, and the last tram of the night rattled past the shuttered noodle stalls without slowing.

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The commission came from a bookseller named Mr Tanabe, who visited every Thursday at closing time. His wife had died in February, and he wanted a seal for the flyleaves of the poetry he was reprinting from her handwritten copies. "Plum first," he said, turning his hat in his hands. "Plum opens when nothing else dares to." Mitsuko did not ask him what the characters should say. He had already written them out on a scrap of paper, and they were the same ones she had been taught to carve on her first day.

She worked three nights on it. On the third, she pressed a test proof into red paste and laid it on rice paper. The characters came out clean, but in the margin she had sketched a branch of plum, and where her hand had trembled the ink had bled into a crooked, feathery line. She nearly burned the page.

When Mr Tanabe came on Thursday, he held the proof up to the lamp and looked for a long time at the stray ink. "This is the only part I can read," he said quietly. He paid in coins, wrapped the seal in its cloth and walked off towards the bridge. Mitsuko pinned the spoiled proof above her bench, where the branch kept blooming in the lamplight.