Black linework tattoo of chrysanthemum flowers and leaves on the inner upper arm, in a botanical outline style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chrysanthemum blooms on an inner arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two large chrysanthemum-style blooms with layered, curling petals and several serrated leaves trailing down towards the elbow. It is rendered in bold black outline with minimal shading, so the petals are defined by line rather than fill. The image is a close, slightly angled photo of skin on a pale surface, with the design filling most of the frame.

Botanical Fine line Upper arm Chrysanthemum Flower Leaves Bloom

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp's giving out and I'll not waste oil on a story you've heard the shark version of. This one's about the flowers. My father signed on the Marguerite Lowe in the spring of 1911 with a wooden box of chrysanthemum roots given him by a widow in Yokohama, who pressed them into his hands on the quay and told him they'd never survive the Horn. Everyone aboard said the same. The bosun wanted them over the side by the second week.

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They kept them under the galley skylight, watered from the cook's kettle, and when the wind came round to the south-west and the ship rolled like a drunk, the blooms bent and curled and refused to die. Old Tobias Frane, who could not read but could draw anything with a pencil stub, sat with them every evening. He drew the heads of the flowers on the back of the chart paper, one petal at a time, because the forecastle light was too poor for colour and he had only the one ink pot.

By the Falklands the box held nothing but leaves. One night a boy with a fever asked Frane to do something to pass the hours, so Frane rolled up the lad's sleeve, pricked the outline into the skin with a sail needle and soot ink, and told him to keep still. No shading. Frane said shade was for people who needed telling where the light came from. The line alone was enough to hold the petals in place.

The last of the roots went into the ground at Valparaiso, where a woman in a green shawl took the box without asking a single question. Frane never saw them bloom properly. The boy grew old in Bristol and would lift his sleeve to show the children how the petals curled inward, as if they were listening. That's the whole of it. Now the lamp's out, so mind the step.