Black and grey botanical tattoo of peonies and leaves on the outer thigh of a person sitting in a car.

Black and grey peony cluster on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of large peony blooms with leaves and buds sits on the outer thigh, drawn in black outline with grey shading. The linework is clean and the shading gives the petals some depth. The legs are bare with denim shorts and white sneakers, photographed in a car interior with a warm blurred light in the background.

Botanical Thigh Peony Flower Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry was late again, so the peony roots sat on the quay in their hessian sacks while the gulls worked at the knots. Aunt Morag had ordered forty crowns from a nursery in Perthshire back in October, and every one had to be counted before the boatman would let the crates off. I counted twice, in pencil, on the back of a tide table.

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The island has one walled garden, Sorley's, and nobody had grown peonies in it since the wall came down in the gale of 1998. Morag wanted them back for the June fête. She knew the old varieties the way other women knew hymns: Sarah Bernhardt, Festiva Maxima, and a dark one she called Old Mrs Ferrier that no catalogue would admit to. I dug the holes with a borrowed spade while she sat on an upturned bucket and told me which blooms were too heavy to stake and which would open before the rain.

By the second week the buds had come, tight and round as fists, and the leaves had unfurled ragged and dark. Morag died on the Tuesday, quietly, with the kettle on. The committee wanted the garden cleared for the stalls. I went down with secateurs meaning to take the lot to the tip, but the first bloom had opened overnight, black at its heart and pale at its ruffled edges, heavy as a wet sleeve.

I did not cut it. I sat on her bucket with my sketchbook until the light went, drawing each petal in outline and pressing the shadow in with the side of the pencil. When the ferry came in on Thursday, the skipper left a sack of bulbs on the wall without a word. Across the top, in her square capitals, Morag had written OLD MRS FERRIER, and underneath, smaller, ONE MORE YEAR.