Seated person with an orange peony tattoo on the calf, a blue rose on the thigh and a neo-traditional style sleeve on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Orange peony and blue rose on legs

Japanese · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A seated person's legs and forearm show several tattoos, the most prominent being a large orange peony with dark grey shaded leaves wrapping around the knee and upper calf. A blue rose with dark green leaves sits on the thigh, and a rose with red petals appears lower on the leg. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth, with mixed orange, blue, green and grey ink against a grey concrete background.

Japanese Neo-trad Botanical Calf Thigh Forearm Peony Rose Flower Leaves Snake Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had been told the blue rose could not be grown, only faked, and she had spent three winters proving the nursery's old men wrong with a kettle of logwood dye and a sack of grafting wax. The rose that came up from the cold frame on the second Tuesday of March was the colour of a wet slate roof. Mr Fenwick held it to the lamp and said nothing, which was how he said he was impressed.

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Across the path, behind the glass, the peony had not opened in four years. Its bud sat in the pot like a clenched orange fist, its grey-green leaves folded over it as if keeping a secret. Her grandmother had brought the root from Canton in a tea chest, wrapped in wet sacking, and had sworn it would bloom only for someone who wasn't looking for it.

On the morning of the frost fair, Ada stopped looking. She went down to the river to watch the ice carts and came back with cold hands and a bruise on her shin from a barrow. The glasshouse was steaming. The peony had split its bud and was unfolding petal by petal, orange as a lantern, shaded at the edges with the grey of coal smoke, and tucked against its base was the blue rose, its own petals loosening as if it had been waiting to be introduced.

Fenwick came in and looked at both flowers for a long time. "Well," he said at last, "the root never did care for the dye." Ada laughed, and it surprised her how much the sound carried in the empty glass.