Colour Botanical tattoo of peach peony flowers with green leaves and buds across a woman's shoulder and upper arm, outlined in black.

Peach peony and leaves on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A large peony-style flower in peach and orange tones dominates the design, with a smaller bud and several rounded buds or berries below it. Green leaves with black outlines and soft grey shading spread down over the upper arm, and the black linework is bold and even. The photograph is taken from behind and above at an angle, cropped at the neck and upper arm, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Botanical Neo-trad Shoulder Upper arm Peony Flower Leaves Bud Berry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cuttings had been wrapped in wet newspaper for three days, and by the time the bus pulled into Dry Wells the paper had gone the colour of weak tea. Nell held the bundle on her knees the way she used to hold her baby brother on the ferry, as if the thing might tip over if she breathed wrong. The driver shouted that this was the last stop before the pass, and nobody got off except her.

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The café had shut in the spring. Only its sign was left, a painted peony on a board some long-dead proprietor had put up for his wife, faded almost to nothing. Behind it, where the water tank used to stand, was a patch of brown earth with a crack running through it like a cut across a knuckle. Nell dug with a tablespoon from her bag. The soil came up grey and stubborn, and she thought of her grandmother in the Lincolnshire garden, bent double over her beds, saying peonies would sulk for years before they flowered and you simply had to wait for them, the way you waited for a bus.

She planted the three roots at dusk, watered them from the bottle she had bought for the journey, and sat on the kerb while the light drained out of the hills. Lorries thundered past without slowing. By morning a green tip was pushing through, no bigger than a fingernail, and by the afternoon two leaves had unfolded like hands with their fingers spread. Nell stopped watching the road for a bus that was never coming.

Her grandmother would have said it was too early for flowers. Nell sat beside the faded board and watched the first bud split at its edge, showing a flush of peach under the green, and she decided that was enough to be going on with.