Black fine line tattoo of a chrysanthemum with oak-style leaves and a dotted circle outline, on the inner forearm, against a brick wall.

Chrysanthemum and oak leaves on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A chrysanthemum bloom sits at the top of a single stem with three lobed, oak-like leaves, and a faint dotted circle frames the flower head. The linework is clean and uniform in black ink, with light grey shading on the leaves to give them depth. The composition runs diagonally up the inner forearm, with the bloom at the top and the stem tapering toward the wrist, set against a red brick background.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Chrysanthemum Flower Leaf Stem Dotted circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Along the cliff path at Scarrow Ness there was one thing that grew without asking leave of the weather, and that was the chrysanthemum Hester Dunn kept in a lard tin on the sill by the lamp-room door. Her husband Amos said it was foolishness to water a flower on a rock where the salt took the paint off the rail. She watered it anyway, every morning before she lit the stove, and in October it opened a head as round and close as a fist.

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The winter the Sarah Brine went down off the Ness, Amos was ashore on the mainland with his chest, and the light was Hester's to keep. The oil ran low by the third night. She climbed the stair with the lamp in one hand and a can of paraffin in the other, and found the great glass dark where the wind had worked under the shutters. She stood there until her hands stopped shaking, then she set the wick by feel, the way Amos had shown her.

She counted the turn of the lens, one sweep every ten seconds, and watched the beam go round over the black water like a hand drawing a ring on a slate. Out past the Ness, somewhere under the swell, she knew the rock lay waiting. Dawn came grey. Three boats came in on the flood, following a light that had not gone out.

Amos came back on the Tuesday boat and found the tin still on the sill, the bloom gone brown at the edges and the stem bent toward the glass. He said nothing that day. The next spring he dug a sapling oak from the lee of the wall and set it in the ground beside the tin, and the two of them grew up the cliff together.