Neo-trad woman and peony on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman's profile in a feather headdress is framed by a large peony and dark leaves on the upper arm and shoulder. The design uses bold black outlines, solid black hair and feathers, and soft grey shading on the face and petals. Muted pink-grey tones and touches of tan appear in the flower and headband, and the design fills the arm in a rounded composition.

Neo-trad Upper arm Woman Profile Peony Flower Feather Leaves Headband Bead Hair Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peonies came over on the Tuesday boat in wet newspaper, forty stems packed tight, and by the time I got them into buckets in the back kitchen half had already shed their petals across the lino. Mrs Quayle would have a fit. She had ordered them for the Harvest Ball, pink as the inside of a shell, and made me write the order out twice in case I got the shade wrong.

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The backdrop was Danny's work. He painted it the summer he came over to mend the pier railings: a woman turned in profile, chin lifted, a headdress of long feathers fanning out behind her, and a peony the size of a dinner plate blooming over one shoulder. The regulars said she looked like a duchess from somewhere far off, and nobody asked him who she was. He left on the last boat in October with a bag of brushes and no forwarding address, and she stayed on the wall above the bandstand, gazing towards the mainland as though she had been waiting for a reason to follow him.

I carried the buckets through to the hall at six. The band was tuning in the corner and Mrs Quayle was up a stepladder fussing with the bunting. She wanted the flowers on the trestle tables, not the stage, so I set them out in rows. A dozen stems were left over. I took the one with the darkest heart and stood it in a jam jar on the piano lid, right beneath the painted cheek.

By the first waltz a petal had dropped onto the ivory keys, then another. I left them there, pink against the yellowed white, until someone asked me to wipe them up.