Black tribal flash design with cherry blossoms, waves and a central medallion, in a bold blackwork style with no body part shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal and cherry blossom sleeve design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a tribal-style design that sweeps from a curled top section down into a long tapering tail. A round medallion sits near the top, surrounded by stylised waves, cherry blossom flowers and petals, with hands and spiral motifs in the lower body. The design uses solid black areas and fine white-line detail on a plain white background, with no colour.

Blackwork Tribal Cherry blossom Wave Spiral Medallion Hand Swirl Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Ashby had been counting the lodgers' towels since Easter, and the number never came out right. Room four had been empty since the Dutch cook left in March, owing a fortnight's rent and a sheet of thick cartridge paper under the bed. Nell found it while stripping the sheets. On it, in black ink, someone had drawn a wave that curled over itself like a question mark, its crest broken into cherry blossom, and down its back ran a long tail of interlocking blacks that stopped only where the paper did.

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She took it down to the front room, where Mr Pryce was mending the dining chairs with wire and bad language. "Sailor's doodle," he said. "Cook had a steady hand for it. Did the galley ceiling on the Mercy with a compass point." He turned the sheet to the window. "Those little hands there keep the bad water off. Or so he said."

Nell kept the sheet. In the evenings she traced the spiral with her finger until the lamp guttered, remembering how the cook had told her, in English that came and went like the tide, that a tail should always be longer than the wave, or the sea would not come back. She did not believe him. She pinned the drawing above the sink anyway.

Three weeks later the spring tide pushed a length of black wrack up the steps to the back door, curled and tapering to a point. Nell stood in her slippers with the bucket in her hand and watched it lie there, neat as a drawn line, until the next wave came up and took it back.