Colour tattoo of a perched kestrel with pink peonies and peach poppies on a person's upper back and shoulder, in a neo-traditional botanical style.

Kestrel and peonies across a shoulder blade

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A kestrel perches on a leafy branch with pink peony blooms and peach poppy-like flowers arranged around it across the upper back and shoulder. The linework is bold and outlined, with soft shading on the bird's feathers and petals and darker tones in the green leaves. The palette is muted pinks, peach, olive green and grey-blue, and the design fills the frame from the shoulder blade over the top of the shoulder.

Neo-trad Botanical Back Shoulder Bird Peony Poppy Flower Leaves Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Demetrios,

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The kestrel came back to the garden wall on the third day after the rains, as if it had been invited. You will laugh at me, but I sat under the fig with my bread and it watched me the way the magistrate watches a man who owes him money. Mother's peonies are open now, all of them at once, the heavy pink ones she bought from the Paeonian woman at the harbour and swore would cure her knees. They have cured nothing, but they smell of honey and wine, and the bees are drunk on them.

Thessa wants the bird gone. She says a kestrel in the garden means a kestrel in the dovecote, and she is right, as she usually is. Last week I found a dove's wing floating in the cistern. So I have been thinking about it, and I have decided nothing, which you have always told me is cowardice wearing sandals.

Yesterday I climbed the ladder to mend the trellis and the bird was perched on the rope, close enough that I could see the dark stripes on its face and the small grey shoulders. It did not fly. It looked at the peach-coloured poppies Thessa planted for the oil, then at the red peony by my elbow, then at me. I felt I was being asked a question I did not understand.

I have left the lattice open for it. If the doves go, the doves go. Come at the new moon and tell me I am a fool, which I will enjoy more than anything the bird does.

Your brother, Nikandros