Fine line black chrysanthemum sprig tattoo with leaves and a long stem running down the ribs and abdomen, beside a gold navel piercing.

Chrysanthemum sprig on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black line drawing of three chrysanthemum blooms on a leafy stem, with the largest flower at the top and a smaller bloom to the right. The linework is fine and even, with light shading inside the petals and leaves, and the tattoo is entirely black and grey. The design is centred on the torso beneath the bust, with the stem extending down towards the navel, and a denim shirt and white top frame the bare midriff.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Chrysanthemum Flower Leaves Stem Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chrysanthemums came up through the cracked flagstones of the inner ward the same week the council sent its letter about the tower roof. My mother said that was no coincidence. Nothing at Hallowmere had ever been a coincidence, least of all the way the old lord's gardener had set the beds against the curtain wall three hundred years ago, so the flowers would bloom last, after the rest of the estate had gone to sleep.

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Every morning I climbed the north stair with secateurs and a flask of tea and counted the heads. Bronze ones by the postern, white ones under the gatehouse arch, a stubborn pale crowd where the wall had split. Mr Ashdown from the trust wanted them cleared before the coach parties came in spring. He said they were weeds with good manners. I said weeds don't time themselves to the frost, and he gave me the look people give a woman who talks to plants.

The letter came in November, tucked into the gatehouse box under a stamp I didn't know. It was from a Mrs Okada in Kyoto, who wrote that her grandfather had worked for a Scottish engineer on the railway and had carried a sprig of this same flower home in his cap. She asked whether the ward still had chrysanthemums on the east wall. I walked out to check, though I already knew. Three heads, one tall, one leaning, and a third just beginning to open in a slow, tightly wound spiral, like something deciding to stay.

I pressed the tallest one between the pages of the visitors' book and posted the whole book to Kyoto with a note that said only: still here. Mr Ashdown can keep his coach parties. The ward belongs to the flowers until the frost says otherwise.