Watercolour-style botanical tattoos of cherry blossom and lavender running down both lower legs and onto the ankles.

Watercolour blossom and lavender on both legs

Botanical · Calf · Colour · Photo

Two bare lower legs and feet show a matching pair of tattoos, each a branch of pink cherry blossom with green stems, with purple lavender sprigs rising higher on the right leg. The linework is loose and sketchy, and the flowers are built from soft washes of pink, blue, yellow and orange that fade into the skin, giving a painted watercolour effect. The design sits on a dark leather background, and the branches run diagonally down from the shins towards the ankles.

Botanical Calf Ankle Cherry blossom Lavender Branch Flower Leaves Watercolour Leg Feet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Hana,

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The cherry tree in the Okada garden had been dead for three winters before anyone thought to ask me about it. Old Mrs Okada wanted a painting for the wedding banquet hall, something to hang behind the top table so the guests would have spring while it was raining in Leeds. I told her I paint wet, quick and slightly wrong, the way ink runs before you can tell it to stop. She said that was exactly what she wanted.

I spent four evenings at her kitchen table with a jam jar of water going grey and a stack of cheap paper. Each wash had to dry before the next went on, so the pink came out pale at the edges where the blue had dragged it. On the third night the lavender refused to behave. I kept painting spikes of it into the corner of every sheet, and she laughed and said her husband had grown it along the fence for forty years and she had never once kept it out of the house.

On the day itself I stood at the back with my hands in my coat pockets and watched the panels go up. Nobody looked at the blossom. They looked at the bride and at the cloud of colour that spilled out behind her, and I found I did not mind. Tell your mother the lavender is still in the corner of the last sheet, where I could not stop it, and that she is welcome to keep it.