Pencil and ink line drawing of a chrysanthemum in a Japanese style, shown as a tattoo design on paper with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chrysanthemum line drawing design

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed chrysanthemum bloom drawn in clean black outline, with layered curling petals radiating from a tight centre. Faint pencil construction lines remain visible around the petals, and the shading is limited to a few shadowed edges. The flower fills the centre of a plain cream sheet of paper.

Japanese Botanical Chrysanthemum Flower Petal

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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 down, sit down, you'll not hear me over that kettle. Leave it, I'll tell it over the whistle, that's how my father told them.

Keep reading

Mind the cabin step, it's worn to a dip. Old Ada Pryce kept the Mercy Jane on the Leeds and Liverpool for forty years, and she never once let a bloom go to waste. Every autumn she carried a pot of bronze chrysanthemums up from the towpath and set it on the roof by the chimney, where the coal smoke could get at them. Her husband said it was daft. The lock-keeper said it was worse than daft, bringing flowers aboard a boat with no garden.

Then came the winter the cut froze thick as a Bible, the lock gates stuck open, and Ada was stranded at Burscough with a load of nothing and a cough like a stoker. She got through it on those chrysanthemums. Not eating them, mind. She sat with the pot on her knee and counted the petals going round, layer on layer, tight at the middle and loose at the edges like a fist opening slow. Every petal curled back the same way, and she said that was the only honest thing on the whole canal.

Come spring the thaw broke off the water in great grey plates, and the Mercy Jane slid out with her roof still green. The lock-keeper's wife came down to the bank to see who'd lived. Ada held up the pot, still blooming, fat as ever.

That's the whole of it. Don't ask me what it means. Drink your tea.