Pencil sketch of a woman's face and shoulders with peony flowers and beaded strands in her hair, drawn as a possible tattoo design in a sketchbook.

Pencil sketch of a woman with peony flowers

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A graphite pencil drawing in a sketchbook shows a woman in profile with her hair swept up, decorated with a large peony at the side and another flower above. Strings of beads hang from the hair and down the neck, with loose petals drifting around the figure. The fine, soft shading and clean outlines are in black and grey pencil on cream paper, with a few leaves sketched in the corner.

Botanical Woman Peony Flower Bead Petal Portrait Hair Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peonies at Sallow Row were the one thing the colliery company had never thought to pave over, so Ada Pryce kept them the way other women kept a chapel. Each May she cut the heads before the rain could bruise them and carried the bucket down the hill past the winding wheel, past the lamp room where the men hung their checks on brass hooks, and set the blooms on the pithead grate for luck.

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Her husband Tom had brought her a string of jet beads from Whitby the summer before. She wore them on Sundays and tied one loose strand round the handle of the bucket. When the fall came at number four that October, and the cage stopped halfway with nine men below it, she was already on the steps with the bucket, and the beads knocked together like a clock nobody had wound.

The rescue men said the shaft was too choked to try for two days. Ada came every morning with fresh peonies and laid them on the grate, and every evening the petals had gone brown at the edges and blown off across the yard. She stopped counting the days. She talked to the grate, to the wheel, and to Tom, who was somewhere under the fall with a shovel and a bad knee.

On the third morning the cage bell rang twice from the dark. The first man up was Davy Lloyd, grey as the slag heap and asking for water. Tom came up last, and Ada did not look at him for a long moment, because the petals had come loose from the bucket and were drifting round the wheel like pale hands. When she bent to gather them, a single jet bead had rolled into the grate. She put it in her apron pocket with a dry petal, and she never wore the string again.