Colour tattoo of two birds perched on a cherry blossom branch, spreading across the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two birds on a cherry blossom branch

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of two perched birds on a branch, with pink cherry blossom flowers and dark branches spreading across the upper arm and onto the shoulder. The birds have blue heads and wings with orange breasts, shaded smoothly, while the branches are drawn in dark linework. Soft lighting keeps the blossoms bright against the skin, and a black top sits at the right edge of the frame.

Japanese Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Bird Branch Cherry blossom Flower

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cherry on Gull Head had not bloomed in eleven years, so when the first pink came out in March, old Anders Rourke walked up the cliff path in his stockinged feet to see it for himself. He found two birds already on the lowest branch, blue as the sea at noon, with breasts the colour of a rusted hull. They were quarrelling. The taller one puffed up and sang at the other, and the other sang back louder, and neither would give up the branch.

Keep reading

Anders had not spoken to his brother Piet for thirty years, since the matter of a boundary wall and a drowned ewe. He watched the birds until the light went. In the morning he found Piet's boat hauled up on the shingle below the headland, half scraped, with a tin of tar beside it and the lid left off. That was Piet's way of saying the work was not finished and he was tired of doing it alone.

Anders went down to the harbour with two mugs of tea from the tin kettle and sat on an upturned crate by the hull. Piet said nothing. Anders said nothing. Above them, through the gap in the cliff, the blossom came down in small pink drifts onto the water, and the birds called across the gap to each other as though no one had ever been foolish enough to keep them apart.

By midsummer the boat was painted and the wall was rebuilt stone by stone, and a nest sat in the fork of the cherry. Islanders still say the two birds never leave that tree. If you climb Gull Head in spring you will find them quarrelling on the lowest branch, and you will know who they are, and you will not ask which of them started it.