Colour tattoo of a red chrysanthemum with blue-green centre and cherry blossoms in a Japanese style on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chrysanthemum and cherry blossom on a calf

Japanese · Calf · Colour · Photo

A large red chrysanthemum with a blue-green and yellow centre sits on the lower leg, with several red cherry blossom flowers with yellow centres and green leaves wrapping around the upper right. The petals have bold outlines and smooth colour shading in red, yellow, green and blue on a light skin tone. The flowers are arranged in a diagonal sweep that follows the curve of the calf.

Japanese Botanical Calf Chrysanthemum Cherry blossom Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The steward hands you the knife before he tells you the name of the flower. It is a small bronze blade, green at the hilt from years of other hands, and he tells you to keep it sharp enough to split a hair. Beyond the wall the cherry trees have already dropped their blossom into the pond, pink scraps turning slowly on the black water, and the lord's messenger is due at the ninth bell. Every bed in the garden has been stripped to bare stems except one, a row of red chrysanthemums that have refused to open, their outer petals curled tight like the spines of a sea urchin.

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The steward explains it as if he were reading a poem aloud. Spring belongs to the cherry, he says, and autumn to the chrysanthemum, and the lord wants a cup of wine steeped in the late bloom for the new year. You kneel in cold mud and cut the spent heads one by one, and each cut stem bleeds a thin white sap onto your wrist. By dusk only one flower is left, the largest, its centre a disc of blue-green like river stone, and it will not open no matter how you coax it. You sit beside it through the night with a paper lantern, breathing on the petals to keep the frost off them.

At first light the bloom loosens all at once, the red rays unfurling and the yellow tips lifting as though someone has finally lifted a hand. The messenger arrives in a muddy hurry, glances at the flower, and says nothing about it. He drinks from the cup the steward has poured and then asks, very quietly, who cut the stems. The steward looks at you, and you understand that the lord was never testing the garden at all, only whether anyone would stay up with it.

When the carts have gone you wash the knife in the pond. The cherry petals drift against your fingers, and the red chrysanthemum stands on the bank with its petals open to the cold sky. You press one curled ray between the pages of the steward's book, where it will stain the paper the colour of old embers, and you leave the rest of the flower for the wind to finish.