Painted flash design of two skeletons seated among pink cherry blossom branches and green bamboo leaves on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two skeletons among cherry blossoms

Botanical · Colour · Flash

Two skeletons sit close together on a gnarled brown branch covered in pink cherry blossoms, with a few green bamboo leaves at the top. The skulls and ribcages are rendered in soft, realistic painted shading with fine detail on the bones. The pale background is plain white, and the pink blossoms and green foliage give the composition its colour.

Botanical Skeleton Cherry blossom Branch Leaves Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Penrose counted the teaspoons twice before she carried the tray out to the yard, because the council man had come that morning with a clipboard and a tape measure and the word felled in his mouth like a sweet. The cherry tree at the back of Saltcombe House had been there longer than the guesthouse, longer than the chimney stacks and the cracked tiles on the sea side of the roof. Every April it burst out pink over the washing line, and every April the lodgers who had booked the back room came down to breakfast with petals in their hair and said nothing about it.

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That week she had seen them herself. Late, after the last gull had given up on the bins, she had gone out in her slippers and looked up into the branches. Two figures sat on the crook of the lowest limb, pale as candles against the blossom, one with her skull tilted against his, the way Frank used to rest his head on the kitchen wall when his back was bad. Mr Greaves and Miss Marsh, the register said, though the register had been lost in a flood before Ada took over the house. Their bones were gently painted with weather. Nobody had ever seen them eat.

She climbed the ladder with the tray balanced on one arm, which was foolish at her age, and set it on the branch between them. The tea was stewed the way the lodgers preferred it, and the milk had gone a little sour in the jug. "The council wants the tree down," she told them. "I thought you ought to know before the men arrived."

Neither of them moved. A single petal drifted onto the rim of Miss Marsh's cup and stayed there, perfectly still, as if it had been asked to wait. Ada looked at the two of them, at the dark gap where Mr Greaves had once been laughing at something, and understood that the tree had not been planted over a shed or a rubbish pit. It had been planted over them. The first landlady had seen to it, and the blossom had been their only company since.

She poured out two cups and sat down between them, the bark warm under her hip, and let the petals settle into the tea.