Traditional style tattoo of an open hand gripping a peony with a gold band and falling crystals, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand holding a peony on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A hand with spread fingers rises from the wrist, gripping a peony bloom wrapped in a gold band, with leaf shapes and a faceted crystal block below. Bold black outlines and solid black shading define the hand, flower and leaves, with a few small crystal shards scattered beneath. Gold-yellow is used sparingly for the band and accents against the black and grey work, and the design is centred on the forearm.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Hand Peony Flower Leaves Crystal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your collar up, you, and listen, because I'll not tell it twice to a crowd that talks through the good parts. Old Mattie Coyle had a hand that could lift a bloom off wet pavement and keep it open. It wasn't a trick. Her palm was cold as a churchyard gate, and the peonies in Clerkenwell would sit up in it as if they'd been asked nicely.

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She wore a gold band she never took off, filed down from a sovereign her mother left her, and every night she wound it round the stem of whatever flower she'd rescued and carried it down to the crystal sellers under the railway arches. The sellers gave her a sliver of quartz for each one, faceted like the inside of a broken bottle. She kept them stacked in a biscuit tin under the sink and never once counted the total.

Then came the winter the arches flooded and the tin went with it. Mattie stood in the black water up to her shins, hand raised above the surface like a schoolgirl who knew the answer, and the crystals slipped from her fingers one by one, ticking against the brick. She didn't reach for them. She said a peony doesn't need a crystal to stay open, only a hand that remembers to hold it, and then she walked home with nothing but the band.

Next morning the stones were gone from the water and lying on her doorstep, every one of them, set out in a line like a path up to the church. Nobody in Clerkenwell will say who did it. Nobody needed to. Go on, drink up, the bell's about to go.