Black ink flash sheet showing a chrysanthemum, a sunflower and an orchid sprig in fine line drawing, with handwritten size notes beside them.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chrysanthemum, sunflower and orchid flash sheet

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows three botanical designs on a pale grey background: a chrysanthemum at top left, a sunflower at centre right and a branch of orchids along the bottom left. The drawings use fine black ink linework with dotted shading at the sunflower's centre and hatched shading on the petals. Handwritten size notes sit beside each design, and the image is entirely black ink on white paper.

Botanical Fine line Chrysanthemum Sunflower Orchid Flower Stem Bud Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are sent up to Orrin Keep in late October with a clipboard, a tape measure and a letter asking you to record anything growing from the masonry that might loosen it. The gatehouse has no roof, and the wind comes through the arrow slits as if it has an appointment. In the bailey, the first thing you find is a sunflower taller than your shoulder, its face turned to the gap in the curtain wall where the sun still reaches at noon. Nobody planted it. A crow or a careless walker must have dropped the seed into a crack where the mortar gave up.

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By the second afternoon you have filled four pages. Chrysanthemums crowd the foot of the old well, heavy-headed and bronze, bowing as though the stones were a congregation. In the chapel, where the altar slab has split down the middle, a stem of orchids hangs over the drain, pale lips open to nothing but damp. You draw them all, badly at first, then with the patience the job seems to demand. Your pencil keeps drifting toward the hatched shadows under the petals, where the light never quite gets.

On the third morning the sunflower has dropped its head, and its seeds lie across the flagstones like spilt coins. You sit on the lip of the well and wonder whether to log it as dead or spent. Beside you, the chrysanthemum has opened another ring of petals overnight, and a bud on the orchid stem has split its green sleeve.

You write the measurements in the margin the way the old draughtsmen did: height, width, depth of root. Seven centimetres across. Six and a half. Then you leave the last line blank, because the keep has been giving up its stones for four hundred years, and there is no column on the form for what is coming up through them.