Black swallows and a curving cherry blossom branch with small red flowers tattooed on the inner wrist, in a Japanese-inspired style.

Swallows and cherry blossom branch on wrist

Japanese · Other · Mixed · Photo

Two black swallows fly above a curving black branch that is dotted with small red blossoms. The branch has bold, tapered black linework with soft shading near its base, and the red flowers are the only colour. The design runs diagonally across the inner wrist, photographed against a wooden surface.

Japanese Other Swallow Bird Cherry blossom Branch Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sefa had been waiting at the Corvanne crossing since the thaw, and by the third morning Dobrin, the guard with the cracked spectacles, had stopped asking her to open her bag. He only wanted the answer he always got. Where are you going? Home, she said, past the second hill, to the orchard where the cherry trees flower before the rest of the valley has decided on spring.

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Dobrin had never seen the orchard. Nobody on his side of the wire had, not since the old road was closed. But every year the swallows came through over the barrier poles in pairs, low and quick, and they never once stopped for the lamps or the paperwork. He had come to think of them as the only honest travellers the border had ever known.

On the fourth morning Sefa held out a folded square of paper instead of her papers. Inside were four petals, pressed flat and gone the colour of rust. 'My grandmother carried these across,' she said. 'She told me the guard would know them.' Dobrin turned the paper in his thick fingers for a long time. Then he remembered his own mother, who had stitched a sprig of blossom into the lining of his coat the day he was posted to the wire, and who had never once told him where she had got the thread.

The barrier arm rose slowly. Above it two swallows dipped and climbed over the road, and for the first time in twenty years Dobrin did not open the ledger. He only lifted his cap and let the orchard through.