Blue ink botanical tattoo of two peonies with leaves on the inner forearm, shown beside a white vest top.

Blue peony cluster on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A cluster of two peony blooms with layered petals and leafy foliage is tattooed on the inner forearm near the wrist. The linework is fine and detailed, with the shading built from softer wash tones in a single shade of blue. The arm is held across the body against a plain pale wall, with the tattoo as the main focus.

Botanical Forearm Peony Flower Leaves Bouquet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The Bramleys are dropping early this year, and I have stopped pretending I can manage the ladder without Mrs Okafor's boy holding it. The pickers come Saturday. I've kept the two peonies by the gate, the ones Dad put in the year you were born, though they've gone past their best and the heads are sagging into the grass like wet paper. I cut the last bloom this morning and brought it in, because you know how Mum used to float them in the blue dish.

The dish is the one with the cracked foot that she wouldn't let anyone throw out. I found it under the stairs wrapped in a tea towel with the Christmas lights. The blue is the same as always, that dark cobalt that looks almost black at the rim and then opens out where the light gets in. Someone at the church fête told me once it came over from Holland before the war, and Mum always said that was nonsense, it was from the market in Ashford for two shillings. I think she liked not knowing.

I sat with it on the kitchen table for an hour yesterday, not doing anything useful, and thought how odd it is that the flowers you can't keep are the ones that stay in a pattern. The blooms on the dish have layers like the petals do, one folded inside another, and every time I look I find a curl I hadn't noticed before. I've decided to leave the house as it is until after the harvest. Come up when you can. Bring the girls. They can have the dish when I'm gone, but not before, and you can tell them that's a threat.

Love, Jo