Colour tattoo of purple and red chrysanthemums with green leaves and grey shading across an upper arm and shoulder, with a real butterfly resting on the flowers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple chrysanthemum tattoo on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo of layered purple and red chrysanthemum-style flowers with green leaves covers the upper arm and shoulder, with a grey wave or cloud shading behind them. The petals are rendered with smooth shading and fine highlights, and the palette is bold against the grey background. A real black butterfly with orange spots sits on the purple flower, and a woman in a yellow top is pictured from a close angle.

Japanese Upper arm Shoulder Chrysanthemum Flower Leaves Butterfly Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook aboard the Marigold Dorrit had one chrysanthemum left in a clay pot, and he would not let anyone move it from the galley hatch. Every morning he turned it a quarter towards the light, the way his mother had taught him in a village where the grey sea came over the harbour wall each winter.

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When the squall came off the Dogger Bank, the crew clung to the rail and listened to the boards groan. Nobody thought of the pot. Only the cook went back down the companionway with his arm around it, and the water poured after him through the hatch like a dog after a bone. He wedged the pot against a tin of peaches on the cutting board and sat on the flour sacks to wait for the ship to decide.

Morning came grey and smelling of tar. On the sill of the galley porthole, where there had been nothing the day before, sat a black butterfly with orange spots on its wings, opening and closing them slowly as though it were reading the ship's log. The cook offered it a crust and it refused. It settled on the purple petals instead, turning this way and that, as if the flower were the only bright thing the sea had left alone.

The crew said the butterfly had come up off the wave, and the cook said nothing, because a cook who talks too much gets his soup thrown back at him. But when they made landfall at Whitby, the pot was empty and the sill was bare. On the quay a girl was selling chrysanthemums from a barrow, and she would not take a penny for them.