Japanese style flash design of three yellow chrysanthemums with green leaves set against black and grey clouds, with no body placement shown.

Yellow chrysanthemums on clouds

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows three yellow chrysanthemum blooms with layered, curled petals and dark green leaves, with one large flower in the foreground. The flowers sit against a black background filled with grey and white stylised clouds, with bold black outlines and smooth tonal highlights on the petals. The palette is limited to yellow, green, black and grey, and the composition fills the whole frame.

Japanese Botanical Chrysanthemum Flower Leaves Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are on the quay at Skerrow before first light, hauling a bucket of chrysanthemums that Mrs Oddie from the chandlery has insisted you take aboard the Margaret Rose. "Yellow for luck, and don't you dare let Dennis put them in the wheelhouse," she says, and you promise, because she has never once been wrong about the weather.

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Out past the breakwater a bank of cloud is stacking up grey and high, rolling in like something combed by a giant hand. Dennis squints at it and spits over the side. You think of the flowers in the old woman's garden that came through the frost, petals layered tight as roof slates, while the first swell lifts the hull and the nets run out through the gunwale in long brown ropes.

The hours go slowly. The catch is thin, then thick, and the boat leans so far that the blooms slide across the deck and you catch them one by one, wet and glowing against the dark water. Somebody shouts your name. You are still holding the largest one in both hands when the cloud finally splits over the bow and the light falls on the sea like scattered coins.

Back at the quay, Mrs Oddie is waiting with her arms folded. You hand her the flowers, bruised but whole. "Told you," she says, and she says nothing more, because she never needs to.