Black ink drawing of a chrysanthemum with leaves in a botanical dotwork style, drawn on pale paper placed on a wooden table.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chrysanthemum design drawn in ink and dots

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a large chrysanthemum bloom with layered, curling petals and several leaves, with a smaller bloom behind it. The petals and leaves are built from fine outlines and dense stippled dots that create soft shading and depth. The design is shown in black ink on off-white paper, centred on the sheet and photographed at an angle on a wooden surface.

Botanical Dotwork Chrysanthemum Flower Leaves Petal Bloom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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The rain has been coming sideways down Gillow Street since Monday, and the chrysanthemums are the only things on the stall that don't mind it. They came up from the glasshouses at Pelham before dawn, bronze and cream and a deep wine colour that looks almost black when it's wet. Dad always said you could tell a good bloom by the way its petals curl back on themselves, as if it has somewhere better to be. I stripped the lower leaves the way he taught us and stood them in buckets along the front.

Mr Aske comes every Thursday for one white bloom, never the yellow. He holds the wrapping paper the way he holds a letter he's already read twice. Last week he told me the yellow ones were for the living, and I said Dad always reckoned it was the other way round, and he laughed so hard he had to put a hand on the scales.

He didn't come today. Instead a lad from the fishmonger's arrived at half eleven carrying a black umbrella that wasn't ours to lose, and said Mr Aske had gone up to the infirmary in the night and asked for it to be brought back to the stall. The lad looked at the buckets, then at me, and didn't seem to know what to ask for. So I wrapped a white bloom in brown paper, printed his name on a card in capitals, and tied it to the umbrella handle.

Come home at Christmas if you can. The stall will need shutting up properly, and the rain will be exactly as wet as it is now. I kept one wine-coloured bloom back in the crate, the one with the curl like a wave going over. I'm not sure who it's for yet.

Love, Nell