Colour tattoo of a large pink chrysanthemum with green leaves and grey shading on the upper arm, in a Japanese style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink chrysanthemum with leaves on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large pink chrysanthemum bloom fills the centre of the image, with layered petals shaded from light pink to deep red. Green leaves frame the flower on the left and right, and soft grey shading sits behind the bloom to suggest depth. The photograph is taken close up on the upper arm, with a tattoo machine and a blue cloth visible at the bottom edge.

Japanese Botanical Upper arm Chrysanthemum Flower Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bloom had been drooping in the cab for two days before I admitted it was dying, and by then the road east of Tonopah had swallowed the last bar of signal on my phone. Marisol bought the pot from a petrol forecourt in Barstow, a sorry chrysanthemum in a plastic tub, pink as cough sweets. Her grandmother grew them along a fence in Michoacán, she said, and a flower that stubborn deserved a proper window. I told her the passenger window of a lorry didn't count, and she laughed and told me to drive.

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Forty miles out, the heat came off the tarmac in sheets and the needle on the temperature gauge crept towards red. I pulled into a gravel lay-by where somebody had nailed a faded Virgin to a fence post, plastic roses wired to the wood. I filled the bottle from the jerrycan under the bunk and knelt in the grit, tipping water into the tub. The leaves lifted a little, the way a man lifts his head when he hears his name called from another room.

I stayed longer than I meant to. Heat shimmered over the flats, and a hawk turned slow circles above the wire. I thought about the three depots I'd skipped and the dispatcher who had stopped texting me back. Nobody had ever asked me to stop anywhere, and here was a flower doing it for me, its petals still tight but showing the first ruffle of red at their tips.

By the time we reached Ely the petals had fully opened, layers of pink fading to garnet at the heart, and the dashboard smelled faintly of earth. I drove the last hundred miles with the window down so it could taste the sage, and I didn't once look at the clock.