Fine line black outline tattoo of peonies and buds arranged in a triangle on the inner upper arm.

Floral triangle on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A triangular cluster of peony-style flowers and buds is drawn in a single black outline on pale skin. The linework is thin and even, with no shading or fill, so the petals show only as open contours. The image is a close crop of an inner upper arm, with a red sleeve at the top left and a light textured surface beneath.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Peony Flower Bud Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody remembers who first called it the triangle, but by the Lower Sixth everyone did. Mr Pardoe had marked three corners with bricks behind the chemistry block and told you that anything planted in a triangle would hold its shape through a hard winter, which was the kind of nonsense you believed at sixteen. The peonies came from a cutting someone's nan had given the school, and for two springs they didn't flower at all. They just sulked in their clumps of leaves while the rest of the grounds went to seed.

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At the reunion, in the function room of a Rotherham hotel that smells of carpet shampoo and warm sausage rolls, Joanne Pell finds you by the raffle table. She still has the same laugh, a bark that turns heads. "You still owe me a trowel," she says, and you tell her the trowel is in a skip in Doncaster somewhere, which is true. Then you tell her about the root you took home in a jam jar the summer the bricks were pulled up for the new science block, which is the part you have never said aloud.

She listens with her glass held against her chest. You admit it flowered in your mother's back garden in June, three heads on one stem, the middle one fat and blush-pink, and that you stood at the kitchen window with the kettle going cold, thinking of a triangle nobody ever planted properly. Joanne doesn't say anything clever. She rummages in her handbag and brings out a sandwich bag holding a single pressed petal, soft as tissue, which she has carried for almost thirty years without knowing why.

"Well," she says, tucking it into your hand, "it's still a triangle, then."