Colourful Japanese style tattoo of a yellow chrysanthemum and a pink flower with grey waves across the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chrysanthemum and pink flower on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman's upper arm and shoulder carry a large tattoo of a yellow-orange chrysanthemum at the top and a pink flower below it. Grey shaded waves and clouds run behind the blooms and across the lower arm. The colour is saturated and the shading is smooth, and the arm fills most of the frame against a dark brick wall.

Japanese Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Chrysanthemum Pink flower Wave Cloud Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every August the sea came up the lane to the door of Mrs Pell's boarding house, and every August she set out two cups on the step for the sea to take, one gold and one rose, because her grandmother had told her the waves liked to be thanked in colour.

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Her son Tobias went down to the harbour wall the year the herring failed. He carried a yellow chrysanthemum wrapped in wet newspaper, the last bloom from the bed under the scullery window, meaning to give it to the water so the boats might come home. Fog came in grey as wool and took the lamps one by one. Mrs Pell stood at the top of the steps with the kettle going cold and counted to four hundred, which was as long as her grandmother had said to wait.

At four hundred the cloud lifted off the bay like a lid. Tobias was sitting on the wall with his boots dripping and a pink lotus in his lap that he had not brought, a flower no one on that coast had ever grown. The boats were coming in behind him, low and slow, lit by a light that rose out of the waves themselves. He said a woman in a white coat had handed it to him on the steps and told him to carry it home to the kitchen window.

Mrs Pell put the pink bloom in the gold cup and the gold one in the rose cup, and the sea went back down the lane without another wave. Every boarder who has slept under that roof says the water in the bay still runs gold and pink at its edges on still mornings, and the herring have never failed since.