Colourful botanical tattoo of roses and poppies across a woman's shoulder, with a smaller floral design on the back of her hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral bouquet tattoo on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A woman seen from behind, with her face out of frame, shows a bouquet of roses, poppies and peonies in pink, red, orange and yellow across her shoulder and upper back. Soft, painterly shading and green leaves give the design a watercolour-like feel, and a small floral piece sits on the back of her hand. The background is a pale wooden panelled door with a stack of books to the right.

Botanical Shoulder Hand Rose Poppy Peony Flower Bouquet Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shush now, the kettle's on its last legs, same as my knees. You all came back to Cranbrook Road hoping I'd tell the one about the Whitsun fête, and I will, because it's the only story I've ever told that ended with a bouquet.

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Dora Venn ran the flower stall that year with her father's blooms, roses the colour of cherry cough sweets, poppies stuffed with black seed, peonies heavy as wet washing. Teddy Marsh came by every afternoon for a fortnight, pretending he wanted a single carnation for his mother. He never bought one. He left a paper cone of sweet peas on the tombola table instead, and Dora left it there too, because she was too proud to pick it up in front of the vicar.

The turn came when the marquee blew down on the Saturday. Teddy was under the canvas holding a pole while the rest of us ran for the tea urn, and when he crawled out with his shirt torn and his palms bleeding, Dora had already wrapped his hands in a tablecloth, tearing the best peonies apart for bandage out of sheer panic. Nobody sold a single stem that day.

So when she married him, the bouquet was roses and poppies and nothing else, and every spring after, she'd say the flowers had been bleeding for him long before he ever said a word. Thirty-one years, and I never once saw her regret a petal. Now drink your tea and mind the biscuits, they're the cheap ones again.