Japanese-style chrysanthemum sleeve in red and black dotwork covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red chrysanthemum sleeve on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large sleeve tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder, centred on two red chrysanthemum blooms with grey leaves. Below them, a row of black outlined chrysanthemum fans runs down the arm, all built from fine stippled dots. The image is in colour and shows the tattoo against a dark background, with the wearer's tank top visible at the edge of the frame.

Japanese Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Chrysanthemum Flower Leaves Fan Sleeve

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Before the frost came down off the hills, Sumiko's mother-in-law sent her to the edge of the cedar wood with a basket and a bamboo pricker, and told her not to come back until she had found the two red flowers that grew where the stream bent. Nobody in the village of Hanabara had seen them in forty years, but everyone knew the stories about flowers that grew only where a dyer had died with her work unfinished.

Keep reading

Sumiko went along the bank for three days. She ate dried persimmon and slept under the cart of a charcoal man who said little except that the wood was owed a debt. On the fourth morning she found the blooms in a clearing, large as cart wheels and red as madder pressed into cloth, with grey leaves wet from dew that never dried there. Between the petals the stems were ringed with small fans, each one made of a hundred tiny dots, the way her grandmother had pricked the lines of a kimono so the dye would sink without bleeding.

She cut one bloom, as she had been told, and wrapped it in damp paper. Then she stopped, because the charcoal man was standing at the edge of the trees with a basket of his own. He asked what she meant to do with the flower. She said she would take it home and make her family's cloth bright again. He looked at her hands, freckled with dye from years of pricking, and said that was what the wood had wanted all along, a pair of hands to keep the pattern going. Then he turned and walked back into the cedars.

Sumiko carried the blossom home over the hill. The cloth came out of the vat the colour of a cut peach, and her mother-in-law pressed one fold to her cheek and said nothing at all.