Black and grey Japanese-style peony tattoo with dotwork shading and leaves, sitting on the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey peony on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large peony-like bloom with wavy, layered petals fills the upper arm, with a stem and leaves extending down towards the elbow. The linework is fine and dark, with stippled dotwork shading that gives the petals depth. The image is black and white, and the tattoo is framed against a pale background and a dark top at the shoulder.

Japanese Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Peony Flower Leaves Stem Bloom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp is nearly out and the rain has found the skylight again. You want to know about the peony. Everyone aboard the Mariposa Ruth knew that bloom, though none of them had seen it open, not once in eleven months at sea.

Keep reading

Old Tobias Wren carried the seed in a tin no bigger than a snuff box. A Dutch factor had pressed it into his palm at Canton and said only that it would bloom where the water was kindest. Tobias did not believe him. He planted it in a cracked clay pot lashed to the galley rail, and every morning he tipped the salt spray off its leaves with the flat of his hand.

The sailors laughed at him. The pot slid across the deck in the Bay of Biscay and cracked a second time. Yet the stem kept reaching, pale and stubborn, and when the ship crossed the line the petals began to curl, folding over one another like breaking water that refuses to fall. Tobias said they were not petals at all but waves that had decided to stay put.

Then the storm came off the Horn, and the Ruth went over on her beam for three days. When the sea finally lay down, the pot was gone, and Tobias sat on the hatch with his hands empty. The next dawn he found it wedged under the capstan, the bloom open wide and rimmed with foam, as if it had gathered every wave it had ridden out and stitched them into one great flower.

That is why we say a peony keeps the sea in its petals. Now hush, and finish your tea.