Black and grey Japanese chrysanthemum tattoo with red centres and a central bud across a woman's lower abdomen and hips.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chrysanthemums across lower abdomen

Japanese · Other · Mixed · Photo

Two large chrysanthemum blooms flank a smaller closed bud, with leaves and stems extending across the lower abdomen and hips. The linework is fine and the petals are shaded in soft greys with fine stippled detail. Small red centres add the only colour, against a plain skin tone and a patterned wallpaper background.

Japanese Botanical Other Chrysanthemum Flower Bud Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the wind off the moat has teeth tonight. The old lord of Carrow Keep had a garden walled in grey stone, and in that garden grew nothing but chrysanthemums, because he said they were the only flowers that knew how to die properly. Every autumn they came up white and grey and heavy-headed, like old men at a christening, and every autumn he sent for the gardener's girl to clip them.

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Her name was Wren Halloway, and she was the only one who could coax a bud open. She did it with her thumb and a little warm breath, and nobody asked how. The steward found her one November kneeling in the frost, a thorn-pricked finger pressed to a stubborn bud that would open for no one else. It opened anyway, and at its heart was a red as bright as a robin's breast, the first red anyone in Carrow had seen since the siege.

Now here is the part they don't put in the books. The lord wanted that red for his banners. He ordered every bud pricked so the centres would bleed colour onto the cloth, and Wren refused, so he locked her in the orangery with the frost creeping in through the broken glass.

She didn't die in there. She sat with the closed buds in her lap and talked to them all night, and by morning the walls were white and the whole garden had opened at once, grey petals curling like smoke, every heart the colour of a good red coal. The lord walked out to find them, and the stone bench where he stood is still there, if you care to look. Mind your step on the way out.