Colour neo-traditional tattoo of pink peonies, peach anemones and green leaves across a woman's back shoulder and upper arm, with a small bird near the shoulder blade.

Peonies and anemones across a shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the back of the shoulder and upper arm with two large pink peonies, a smaller peony-like bloom and several peach-toned anemone flowers on trailing stems. Dark green leaves and a small grey bird near the shoulder blade complete the arrangement. The outlines are bold and the petals are shaded with soft gradients, with colour ink dominating the composition.

Botanical Neo-trad Shoulder Upper arm Back Peony Anemone Flower Rose Leaf Bird Floral Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seed packet arrived in March with the wrong postmark, and Margaret Ilsley knew before she opened it that her brother had been at the greenhouse again. Ellis had never once labelled anything. She found the anemones in a glassine envelope, their tiny black centres dry as pepper, and beneath them a sheet of tracing paper covered in pencil stems that climbed the margins like a trellis left to run wild.

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She took the sheet to the harbour wall, where the fishermen mended nets and pretended not to watch her. Tom Vosper, who had once sold her father a crate of mackerel he swore was fresh, squinted at the drawing and said the peonies were the pink of the old Methodist chapel doors, the ones repainted every decade by people who never agreed on a shade. He tapped the corner where a bird had been sketched and then rubbed out, a small grey thing with its wings half folded.

That was the part Ellis had always been unable to finish. He had kept starting the bird and stopping, leaving only a smudge of graphite where its breast should be. Margaret pinned the sheet to the greenhouse door that evening and worked by lamplight, filling the smudge with a little careful grey, and by the time the tide turned she had a garden on paper that looked, for once, like it was growing toward something.

In the morning the seed packet was still on the potting bench, unopened, and she planted the anemones in the cold box where Ellis always said they would not take.