Botanical tattoo of peonies and blue-green leaves with black linework, covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Peonies and foliage on the upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The design shows several peony blooms and open flowers with long, tapering leaves and stems arranged in a dense, rounded cluster. The black outlines are fine and even, with some hatched shading in the petals and flower centres, and the leaves are filled in teal, blue and green. The composition wraps across the outer upper arm and up towards the shoulder, with the flowers mostly left in grey and skin tone.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Peony Flower Leaf Foliage Stem Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peonies came up through the chapel floor the spring after the roof went, and by June they had split the flagstones like loaves left to prove too long. My father swept the petals out of the nave every morning with a broom of birch twigs, and every morning there were more. He said it was the damp. I said it was the castle trying to be a garden again, and he didn't argue, because he had been a boy here too and remembered when the family still came north in August.

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The blooms were the colour of old cream with grey pressed into their folds, as if someone had drawn them in pencil and rubbed the lines dark with a thumb. Between them ran the leaves, long and tapering, teal at the tips and blue where the light slid underneath. I cut stems for the kitchen at the big house down the valley, where Mrs Lowe set them in jugs on the sideboard and never once asked where they grew.

In September a letter came from a solicitor in Carlisle. The estate had been sold to a man who meant to make the walls safe and the outer bailey into a car park for the visitor centre. Men with measuring wheels were already pacing the grass. My father read the letter twice at the kitchen table, folded it into quarters and tucked it behind the clock, where he kept things he did not intend to answer.

The next morning I dug under the oldest bloom with a trowel and then my bare hands, and the root came up pale and heavy as a loaf. I wrapped it in wet sacking, carried it up the spiral stair to the top of the tower, and set it in the embrasure where the sun came through in a long bar. The leaves unrolled in the warmth. Below me the wheels kept clicking across the grass, and I did not look down.