Black and grey chrysanthemum tattoo with detailed hatched petals and a bud, covering the shoulder and upper arm.

Chrysanthemum on the shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large chrysanthemum with curling petals and a drooping bud fills the shoulder and upper arm. The petals are rendered with fine black linework, hatching and stippled shading that gives them volume and a sense of movement. The image is in black and grey, with the flower centred on the shoulder and its stem and bud trailing down the arm against a patterned black and white top.

Botanical Blackwork Shoulder Upper arm Chrysanthemum Flower Bud Petal Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The conservatory at Halloran House had not been warmed since the spring the glass cracked, but the chrysanthemums kept coming back regardless, bronze and white and that dull ash colour the gardener called smoke. Maud Erskine cut them each morning with the short bone-handled knife her father used for grafting, and each morning she laid them on the marble slab in the hall, heads toward the stairs, because the late Mrs Halloran had insisted the flowers should face the living.

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Nobody had told Maud that the house was kept for her cousin Edmund, nor that Edmund had gone to the Continent in February and not written since. She discovered it herself when she found his letters in the bureau, all unopened, the wax seals still whole. The last one had a drawing folded inside it: a flower with petals curling over one another like the lips of a wave, and a heavy drooping bud at its base, shaded so finely in pencil that the paper looked damp.

She took it to the conservatory and held it up against the bruised light. The petals in the drawing were the same as the ones in the glass, and the bud hung exactly where the sick plant's bud had been hanging for a month, as if it were waiting for a hand to lift it. Maud set the drawing face up on the slab, cut one last bloom, and laid it across the paper. Then she sat down on the cold step and waited for the house to open its doors to her.