Black and grey shaded peony tattoo with leaves and a bud on the forearm, in a traditional botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey peony on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large peony bloom sits at the centre of the design, with layered petals shaded in soft greys and a darker centre. Dark pointed leaves and a small closed bud frame the flower on the left, right and below. The tattoo is shown on the inner forearm against a plain, pale background.

Botanical Traditional Forearm Peony Flower Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind's come round off the water and it has ears. There was a woman on Skerrow Quay who kept a peony in a tin bath beside her door, because nothing else would grow in that salt air. Her husband Tom sailed the Ellen Rae out through the west gap, and every morning she carried the bath out to face the boats and carried it back in again before dark.

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The winter the herring failed, the boats came in light and the men took to mocking her. A flower for funerals, they said, and Janet Pell from the bait shed offered to cut it for the wake before there was a wake to hold. Agnes wouldn't let her touch it. The bud sat shut on its stalk all through the dark weeks, tight as a fist, and folk started crossing the street rather than pass the door.

Then one night in February the Ellen Rae came round the breakwater with her mast gone and three men lashed to the wheelhouse rail. Agnes saw her from the window and went out in her nightdress, and the bud on the peony had split while nobody was looking. It opened the way a ledger opens, one leaf at a time, until the middle of it was dark and full and heavy as a wet sail. Tom stepped onto the quay, looked at the bath, and then at her, and said, "You can bring it in now, Agnes. It's done its work."

She didn't bring it in. It's still out there, if you know where to look. Third cottage up from the lighthouse, grey as a gull's back, and nobody on the quay has ever cut a bloom from it.