Black and grey botanical tattoo of peonies, buds and a bee on an upper arm, with sketchy linework and soft shading.

Peonies and a bee on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows several peony blooms, buds and leaves climbing from the elbow area up the arm, with a bee flying near the top. The linework is fine and sketchy, with shading built up in soft grey tones to give the petals depth. The composition is a vertical spray that follows the curve of the arm against a blurred brick wall and a knitted fabric sleeve.

Botanical Upper arm Peony Flower Bee Leaves Bud Bloom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peonies came up first every year, before anything else dared, and my mother used to say they were stubborn because they had been promised something by the frost. We grew them in rows behind the glasshouse in Wisbech, where the fen wind came flat across the drains and nothing stood up straight unless it was tied. The bees came for the peonies only when the bloom was half open, and my father would stand with his hat off and say they were checking the work.

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In the spring of the flood year the water got into the lower beds and the whole crop went brown at the edges. Mr Ashdown from the hall offered to buy the lot for nothing, and my father, who had never once in his life accepted a gift he could not repay, told him to come back in June. So we cut what we could, wrapped the heads in damp sacking and carried them down the lane on a handcart, one bud at a time, while a single bee kept circling over us like it had lost its own hive and meant to find ours.

It followed the cart all the way to the station. I thought it was a nuisance until the train pulled out and I saw it still there above the platform, rising and dipping over the buckets we had left behind on the bench. My father laughed until he had to sit down on his suitcase. The flood took the glasshouse that winter, but the peonies came up again in the rows the water had missed, and the bee, I like to believe, came back for them every June.