Black and grey peony tattoo with shaded petals and dark leaves wrapping around the thigh.

Black and grey peonies on the thigh

Japanese · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Several peony blooms and dark leaves run diagonally across the upper leg, with the largest flowers near the top. The petals are drawn with bold outlines and soft grey shading that gives them depth, and the leaves are filled with dense black. The design is entirely black and grey and fills most of the frame against a grey and white patterned bedsheet.

Japanese Botanical Thigh Peony Flower Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Edna Fairbrother had catalogued the lost property at Harrowgate Road station for nineteen years and could tell a hatbox from a hat at forty paces, but the parcel that came in on the 4.12 from Leeds made her put down her pen. It was wrapped in grey paper, the sort the Co-op used for flowers, and it smelled faintly of rain and wet leaves. Inside was a single peony, pressed flat between two sheets of the Yorkshire Post, its petals gone the colour of ash.

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The label was in pencil: 'Found on the bench by the signal box. Keep for the owner, who will ask.' Edna knew the bench. Every Tuesday for a month a man in a navy overcoat had sat there with a flask and a sketchbook, drawing the blooms that the stationmaster's wife grew in tin buckets along the platform edge. He never asked for anything. He drew peonies in pencil and shaded them with the side of his thumb until they looked as if they might open while you watched.

She took the flower to the shelf marked Miscellaneous, then brought it back. On the reverse of the newsprint someone had written a date in the same careful hand: the week of the big frost, nineteen fifty-two. Edna went to the drawer where the old ledgers lived and found it, her own entry in faded blue ink. One sketchbook, one navy coat, handed in and never reclaimed.

He had come back for the sketchbook, she decided, and left the flower so someone would know. She pressed the peony into the ledger at that page, closed the cover, and wrote under Not Claimed: 'Returned to sender, with thanks.' Then she sat for a long time watching the 4.40 pull out, its lamps smearing across the wet glass, and wondered who in Leeds had been waiting for a man who never got off.