Black line drawing of two stacked spider chrysanthemums with curled, spiky petals, in a Japanese-style tattoo flash design.

Two chrysanthemums in line drawing

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two spider chrysanthemum flowers stacked one above the other, with the upper bloom slightly larger. Each flower has a dense centre of overlapping petals surrounded by long, curled outer petals with hooked tips. The design uses single, even black outlines on a white background with no shading or colour.

Japanese Botanical Chrysanthemum Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every October the wind came off the Channel hard enough to lift the lid of the coal bucket, and Mrs Tamsin Gurney set out the two chrysanthemums on the back step where the salt could not reach them. Her father had grown them from one root the year the boarding house was painted white. The upper bloom was always a finger's width bigger, and she never could say why.

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Lodgers asked. A fisherman from Newlyn wanted to buy the bigger one for his mother's grave, and a schoolmaster said the pair looked like a man stacking his own reflection. Tamsin told them the plants were stubborn. They curled their petals back like cold fingers and would not open for anyone who came to coax them.

The winter the lighthouse keeper's boy went out in the Ferris boat and did not come back, a stranger took the room above the kitchen. He paid in advance and asked for nothing except the back step at dusk. He sat with the flowers every night, counting the hooked tips aloud in a language Tamsin did not know, until one evening the frost took the lower bloom and left the upper standing alone.

In spring she dug up the dead one and planted a new root beside the survivor. It came up pale and strange, with curled petals no one had seen before. The stranger never returned, but the upper bloom bent its head toward the new one, as if it had been waiting.