Photograph of a red plum blossom branch tattoo with black ink and small vertical characters across a woman's upper back, shown from behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Plum blossom branch on upper back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A woman is shown from behind with bare shoulders and back, her dark hair falling to one side. A black branch with red five-petalled plum blossoms runs diagonally across the right shoulder blade, with thin vertical characters beside it and a small red square mark below. Scattered red petals fall down the lower back, with soft shading in the flowers and a clean, painterly line in the branches.

Japanese Botanical Back Branch Calligraphy Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lodger in room four had been gone a week before the post came for him, a stiff envelope addressed in brown ink to Mr. T. Wren, care of Gull's Rest, Saltcombe. I had never seen him write a letter. He spent his mornings at the window with a box of brushes and a bowl of water, painting the same bent branch over and over on sheets of rice paper, then tearing them up when the wind off the harbour got in.

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On the last morning he left me a small stone seal wrapped in a handkerchief, its face carved backwards so the red would print the right way round. "Plum," he said, tapping the top. "It flowers in the cold, before anything has any business doing so. My father said that was a kind of bad manners." He smiled, went off down the front with his case, and I didn't see him after.

The envelope had no return address, only a postmark from a town up the coast. Inside was a single sheet with a black branch painted across it, five red petals drifting from the tips, and beneath them three upright characters I couldn't read. I sat in the back kitchen with the kettle going cold and thought about the petals that blew in from the yard tree every March, how I had always swept them off the step as if they were mess.

I took the sheet to the front room where the seal lay in its handkerchief, pressed it into the red pad, and stamped a square below the painting, slightly crooked, the way he would have hated. Then I wrote on the back: Room four is aired. The tree is flowering. Come when you like. I dropped it in the box on the corner before the last collection, and the next morning the window in room four was open and there were petals on the sill.