Black and grey botanical tattoo of chrysanthemum-style flowers, leaves and berries on a hip and upper thigh, with a skull shaded among the blooms.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey florals on hip and thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large botanical design of layered chrysanthemum-style flowers, leaves and berries curves over the hip and upper thigh, with a skull shape appearing within the shading. The linework is fine and the shading uses soft greys and stippled texture in black ink only. The subject wears a loose cream shirt that is pulled to one side, and the tattoo fills the centre of the frame against a plain background.

Botanical Fine line Thigh Flower Chrysanthemum Leaves Berry Skull Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chrysanthemums had to come out before the first frost, and Ruth had never once managed it in time. By the time she wheeled the barrow up the steep lane to the allotments, the blooms along the top terrace were already browning at their edges, their stiff petals curling like the corners of old letters. Below her the fishing boats knocked against the quay wall, and a gull was arguing with the bins outside the Pilchard Inn.

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Mr Pascoe leaned on the gate with his secateurs in his coat pocket and told her, as he did every year, that chrysanthemums were for the dead. He sold them by the bunch at the chapel steps on All Souls, wrapped in brown paper, and he had never once understood why she grew them in such numbers. She had never told him that her mother planted them for the living, so the house would smell of something other than tar and diesel in November.

She started at the far end, where the ground was darkest. Her spade turned up a bed of old seed heads, grey and papery, and when she stood back to look she saw that the flowers she had planted in three neat rows had grown into a pattern she had never noticed. The shadows of the petals, the leaves dropping in their long shade, and the clustered berries had settled into the shape of a skull, grinning up at the sky from the middle of the bed.

Ruth stood there a long while with the spade on her shoulder. Then she cut only the stems on the lane side, filled the barrow with the tired blooms, and left the skull where it was for the spring to finish.