Black fine line tattoo of a chrysanthemum with a long stem and five leaves, placed on the upper chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chrysanthemum line drawing on the chest

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A single chrysanthemum bloom sits at the top of a long, thin stem with five outlined leaves branching off it. The design is drawn in dark, even linework with little or no shading, and the leaves have simple inner contour lines. The photo is cropped to the chest and hair, with the flower running vertically down the centre of the frame against pale skin and a black jacket.

Fine line Botanical Chest Chrysanthemum Flower Leaves Stem Botanical

Find an artist for this

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, the last tram's gone and the rain has decided to stay. You want the story of the drawing, then you'll hush while I tell it, because I only tell it once a night.

Keep reading

Back when the nursery on Cable Street still kept lamps in every window, a draughtsman called Emil Varga kept a tin of Indian ink and one steel nib that nobody else was allowed to touch. Every evening, after the shutters came down, he sat under a bare bulb and drew whatever the day's flowers had been. He never shaded. Shading, he said, was for people who wanted to be believed. A line was either true or it was not.

One wet night a woman came in off the street carrying a chrysanthemum wrapped in newspaper. It had been cut from her mother's back wall in Bethnal Green, and the petals had gone brown at the edges. She wanted it drawn before it died, so the family would remember how it had stood. Emil turned the stem in his fingers, turned the leaves toward the light, and drew five of them, each with its inner contour, exactly as the wind had left them. He worked until the bulb began to hum and the bloom on the paper looked fresher than the one on the table.

When the woman came back in spring, the flower had gone to dust in its newspaper. The line stood on the page, dark and even, leaning a little toward the window as if it had heard the rain. She paid him in coins and asked how he had kept it so steady. Emil said the trick was to decide where the edge was and never lift the pen to doubt it. Then he locked the tin, switched off the bulb, and let the street do the rest of the talking.