Ink and watercolour drawing of three daisy-like flowers with green leaves, stacked vertically on paper beside real daisies, a pen and a brush.

Three daisy flowers in a vertical ink and wash design

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A vertical botanical drawing of three large daisy or chrysanthemum-style blooms, linked by curving green stems and serrated leaves. The petals are outlined in fine black ink and shaded with pale blue-grey washes, with yellow and orange centres. Real white daisies, a fineliner pen and a paintbrush sit on a wooden surface around the paper.

Botanical Daisy Chrysanthemum Flower Leaf Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chrysanthemums came out of the cold store on the second Tuesday of January, all three crates of them, and Dad swore at every box because the frost had got under the paper and the outer petals had gone the grey-blue of skimmed milk. He said they were finished. I said they were only sulking. We had until the Ashworth wedding on Saturday to decide which of us was right.

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Mum had kept the glasshouse going on her own the winter before she died, and she had a habit of writing on the back of seed packets. I found one tucked under a pot of chalk-white daisies: Keep the big ones warm, the little ones cold, and never let the sun see the middle before the petals. I laughed out loud in that freezing shed, which frightened the cat.

We pulled the best forty heads and stood them in buckets of water with a spoon of sugar. By Friday the centres had opened, a soft orange like the inside of a peach, and the petals curled back as though they were stretching after sleep. Dad came in with his cap pushed back and looked at them for a long time without saying anything. Then he took the pen he used for labelling and wrote something on the packet, underneath her words.

On Saturday the bride carried nothing but white, and nobody noticed the grey on the stems. Afterwards I found the packet in my coat pocket and turned it over. In Dad's cramped capitals, beneath her note, it said: BIG ONES WARM. COLD ONES WAIT. FROST IS ONLY A DELAY.