Black band tattoo with white botanical linework of peonies, leaves and small flowers around the upper arm, shown in three photographs.

Floral band tattoo around the upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Three photographs show the same black band wrapped around a bare arm beneath a dark sleeve. The band is filled with solid black ink, with peony blooms, leaves and small clustered flowers left as bare skin in white negative space. The image is black and grey and the composition is a close crop of the arm in each panel.

Botanical Upper arm Peony Flower Leaf Band Floral pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You want the peonies on the wall of the old glasshouse at Skerrow, the one the wind took the roof off before my grandmother was born. Nobody planted them there. They came up through the mortar the spring after the Halvard boy drowned, and they came up white, which peonies have no business doing in that soil. The women cut them and put them in jugs on the church step, and the minister said that was idolatry, and then he took a jug home himself.

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My aunt Ingrid kept the black ribbon she wore for her man in a tin under the stairs. She'd stitch a band of it round her arm each Sunday, wide as two fingers, and every week she unpicked the old stitches and sewed the same pattern back in, the leaves and the clustered little flowers, all left blank where the thread didn't cover. She said the blank was the part that mattered. You could see the light through what was missing, she said, and that was the whole trick of mourning, to keep the gaps honest.

When she died they found the ribbon folded smaller than a letter, and inside it a single white bloom pressed flat, gone the colour of tea. I took it down to the glasshouse with the tide out. The wall was still there, streaked with salt, and the peonies had run wild across the stones. I put the bloom back where it had come from, and the wind, which has never once in my life been polite, lifted the black band off my own sleeve and carried it out over the rocks.