Black and grey botanical tattoo of peonies, a poppy and leaves across a woman's upper back and shoulder blade, shown in three photos.

Black and grey peony and poppy on shoulder blade

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A collage of three photographs shows a large floral tattoo of peony-like blooms, a poppy, a bud, pansy-style petals and fern-like leaves across the upper back. The linework is fine and dark, with shading built from dotted and hatched textures that give the petals depth. The tattoo is entirely black and grey, and the composition runs diagonally from the shoulder blade down towards the lower edge of the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Shoulder Peony Poppy Flower Leaves Bud Pansy Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spoil heap above Hollins Row has gone red with poppies again, and Mrs Akroyd says it is the coal dust that feeds them, the same way it feeds the rest of us. You stand at the back gate with the kettle ticking behind you and watch the wind lift the petals free like lids off pans. Your father has been dead eleven weeks. The wheel at Bank Top has been still for nine of them.

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Nobody on the row agrees what the flowers are for. The chapel men call them remembrance, a word they handle the way they handle their pipes, carefully and without lighting it. The women call them stubbornness. You think they are simply where the ground was turned over and left alone. The peonies by the lamp room door were planted forty years ago by a man who swore he had no interest in gardens, and every June they hang their heads low over the path as if apologising for the noise of the cages.

So you take the pencil from the rent book and draw the way he taught you, dots first, then hatching, pressing until the nib spits through to the page beneath. The bloom goes down in layers, its folds dark where the light could not reach. The pansies come last, three faces of one flower leaning together like people listening at a door. By the time the kettle boils over, the page holds more shadow than the whole heap ever did.

Mrs Akroyd comes to the gate with an apron full of rhubarb and peers over the fence. 'Hasn't got his colours, has it, love,' she says. 'No,' you say, closing the book on the petals. 'But it's got the shadows. That's where he'd have put them.'