Black and grey botanical tattoo of two peonies, small blossoms and leaves across a shoulder and upper arm, seen from behind.

Black and grey peony piece on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large floral design of two peonies with smaller open blossoms, buds, fern-like fronds and leaves, covering the shoulder and upper arm. The linework is fine and detailed, with soft grey shading that gives the petals depth. The design is black and grey and fills the frame, with the bare back and shoulder of the wearer visible at the edges.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Peony Flower Blossom Bud Leaves Fern Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Penhallow had the last of the turnips out of the clamp by the second week of February, and still her mother's peony bed showed nothing but black stalks and frost. "Leave it," her mother said from the back step, wrapping her hands in her apron. "It sleeps the way the ewes do, all of it inward."

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Ada did not leave it. Every morning before the milking she knelt on the sacking and scraped at the crust with a spoon, looking for the red eye the old woman had told her to watch for. The men at the Hollin farm laughed when she said so. The frost stayed. The wind came off the moor and took the last of the hay from the top field.

On the ninth morning the bed had changed. Two round knots had split at the tips, pale as lambs' ears, and between them, low down among the fern fronds of the dead bracken, three small white blossoms had opened with gold at their centres. Ada sat back on her heels. The snow had gone soft overnight and dripped from the eaves in a steady tick.

She cut the two largest peonies and carried them into the kitchen in a jug of cold water. Her mother looked at them a long time, then took down the tin where the old seed packets were kept and laid one open beside the flowers, empty. "Your grandmother's, that was," she said. "Every spring she was sure they'd not come, and every spring she was wrong." Ada tucked one blossom into the jug's rim and went out to feed the hens.