Ma mentre la loro abilità ad autonomo mentre gli elementi di disegno possono essere circoscritti dall'abitudine, il loro symbolism potente ha intrapreso una durata dei relativi propri. As Motoori Norinaga, noted Japanese scholar of the 18th century, wrote in a poem, “If I were asked to define the spirit of Japan, I would call it the blossom of the mountain cherry, scattering its scent in the morning sun.” For the Japanese, the beautiful period of its flowering and then the all too soon fading and subsequent scattering of petals on the wind, symbolizes life itself - but not life in some abstract and distant sense. The fragility of the cherry blossom is the fragility of human existence; its brief period of life, like our own; its implacable movement toward death, indifferent to the good things of this world, is the ideal death for a samurai warrior; and finally, its individual and perfect beauty is also ours.

The cherry blossom is famous in Japanese poetry, in prose, and in most of the graphic arts. It has become the symbol for all that is transient and evanescent in life. The blossoms appear in all of their beauty for only a day or two. Then they are scattered by the winds and rains. This loveliness lasts for but so short a time: how like life itself, where all things are ephemeral. It is said that the samurai adopted the cherry blossom as a personal insignia, indicating that they might well die in battle the next day. “The cherry blossom as a symbol thus has quasi-philosophical associations . . . of the same order as those attributed to, for example, the red rose in Western tattooing. There the message is undying love, eternal fidelity, and a degree of transcendence over mundane life. In Japan the cherry blossom implies a different kind of transcendence from that in the West. One acknowledges natural forces and quietly celebrates one’s own evanescent qualities. The implications for a man wearing the intricate cherry-blossom pattern are that he is in accord with the nature of things, sad though this nature may be; that his own flesh is as fragile as the petals of the blossom.”The cherry blossom continues to be a popular image in Western interpretations of Japanese style tattooing, often seen gracefully floating intact or with the blossom’s petals scattered through wind or waves that form the background behind larger figurative images that comprise the tattoo.

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