Black line drawing of two chrysanthemum blooms and leaves in a Japanese-style tattoo design, shown on plain paper with no body placement visible.

Chrysanthemum line drawing with leaves

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A pen line drawing of a large chrysanthemum bloom with a smaller bud above it, joined by a stem and several pointed leaves. The petals are drawn with layered, curving outlines and no shading or fill. The design is drawn in black ink on a plain pale background and is centred on the page.

Japanese Botanical Chrysanthemum Flower Bud Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At Saltern Gap the border ran along a dry ditch, and the guard there had a rule about flowers. Nothing with roots was allowed through, because roots carried soil and soil carried blight. Old Ruth Tennant came up the track one grey morning with a wet sack held against her chest, and Corporal Ames stopped her with the flat of his hand.

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What's in the sack, Mother? She said it was a bud, and that she had carried it three days over the scree for a man who would pay well for it. He pulled back the wet cloth. Inside was a chrysanthemum no bigger than a walnut, its petals folded tight as a fist, and below it a second bloom just beginning to loosen at the tips. Ames knew the flower. His own mother had kept a row of them against the north wall of their cottage, bronze and white, and she had made him promise to bury her beneath them.

He did not say so. He only asked whether the man who paid her was still living, and when she shook her head he took a trowel from his belt and dug a hole in the bank beside the post. Ruth set the root in and pressed the earth down with her thumbs. Then he stamped the mud flat and wrote her in the ledger as Traveller, nothing carried.

The petals opened over the next week, slowly, one layer at a time, until the bloom looked like a wheel of lamps turned outward into the rain. The bud above it never did open before the frost. Ames checked on it every morning all the same, and that was enough to keep him at the post.