Traditional style tattoo of a large multicoloured flower with teal petals and leaves, placed over the elbow of a bare arm.

Colourful flower on an elbow

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A large flower with teal, orange, red and purple petals sits over the point of the elbow, with dark teal leaves at the top edge. The petals are outlined in bold black linework and filled with solid colour, with purple dotted shading on some petals. The arm is bent at the elbow against a red and black checkered floor, with a green T-shirt visible behind it.

Traditional Other Flower Petal Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the tar tin, and sit where the lock gate can't splash you. Right. You want to know how the peony got on the Mary Ellen's bow, and I'll tell it once, so listen with your ears and not your mouth.

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Our Walt was a painter of boats, not of anything grand. Cabin doors, roses, the odd castle when an owner could pay for castles. In the winter of the big flood he was hired to do the Mary Ellen at Stoke, and the owner wanted it plain. Walt went out on the towpath at dusk, same as always, and came back with paint on his cuffs that wasn't the colour of any tin he'd bought. Teal, like the river under the bridge where the kingfishers sit. Orange from the pub sign that burned all night. Red he got off a pillar box, and the purple he swore he scraped from the bruise on his own knuckle, which I never believed.

He painted a peony the size of a cartwheel across the bow, black outlined, every petal packed tight as a fist. The owner came down the cut in a rage. Plain, he'd said. Walt only looked at him and said the boat would sink before the flower faded. The owner laughed and paid him anyway.

Three years on, the Mary Ellen went down in the Trent with a load of coal and nobody aboard. They fished her out in spring, hull split, the bow half buried in silt. And the peony was still there, bright as the day it dried, because the river had kept it like a secret. That's what Walt always said, and he never once said it smiling.

So when you're grown and someone asks you for something plain, you think on that bow. Now pass me the rag, and mind the lock.