Black and grey Japanese style chrysanthemums and a serpent tattooed across the back and legs of a woman lying face down on a treatment bed.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chrysanthemums and serpent across legs and back

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman lies face down on a treatment bed, showing a large tattoo covering her back and both legs in black and grey. Chrysanthemum blooms and leaves are shaded with smooth gradients, and a long serpent winds down the legs. The photo is taken from above at an angle, with a dark studio floor and a grey towel in the background.

Japanese Botanical Back Thigh Calf Chrysanthemum Serpent Flower Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chrysanthemums on the terraces above Hollin Cross had gone over early that year, and Mabel Ferrier blamed the serpent, as she blamed it for most things that went wrong in the valley.

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It came up from the mill race every August when the apples hung heavy, coiling down the stone steps between the rows, grey as wet slate, its scales pressed like old coins. It drank from the troughs and never touched a bloom, which was the strange part. Some said it guarded the flowers. Dunstan, who kept the orchard before Mabel's father, said that was nonsense, and that it only wanted the rows left alone.

One evening Mabel went up with a bucket of windfalls and a jug of cider. She set them on the top step and sat with her back against the wall. She told the serpent about her brother who had gone to the cities and never written, about the wet spring, about the price of wire. It listened with its head on the bottom step. When she had finished it climbed to the jug, drank, and then turned the pale blooms with a slow twist of its body until they faced the last of the light.

Next morning the flowers were all turned east, and the grass beside the steps had been pressed flat into a path wide enough for a cart. Mabel never saw the serpent again, but the apples that year were the sweetest in the county, and nobody in Hollin Cross ever cut back the chrysanthemums.