Black and grey peony tattoo with leaves and a line of script across the ribs, shaded in a botanical style with dotwork.

Peonies and script on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of three peony blooms with leaves and buds climbs up the side of the torso, with a line of italic script running beneath the lower flowers. The linework is fine and dark, and the petals are built up with stippled dotwork and soft grey shading that gives the flowers depth. The image is entirely black and grey and is framed closely on the ribs against a plain background.

Botanical Dotwork Ribs Peony Flower Leaves Bud Script Latin text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peony man came down to Skerra Quay the week the herring boats were tied up for good, carrying a canvas roll under one arm and a clay pot wrapped in sacking under the other. Nobody on the quay had seen a peony outside a churchyard, and they told him so.

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He planted the first bush behind the net loft, where the salt wind came off the water and nothing else would grow. Maud Tarrant, who kept the chandlery and had buried two husbands to the sea, watched him dig with his bare hands and said the ground was too tired for flowers. He said the ground was only waiting to be asked. By midsummer the bush was heavy with blooms as big as a man's fist, pale and crumpled like silk that had been slept in, and the gulls would not land on that side of the loft.

Maud came to him in August with a question she had carried all year. Where would the flowers take a person, if a person went with them? He pressed a dried petal into her palm and repeated the saying his grandmother had stitched above her kitchen door: the flowers carry you wherever you are carried. Maud folded the petal into her purse, took the next boat out towards the Orkney ferry, and was never seen on Skerra again. The bush bloomed every June after, and the chandlery kept its door unlocked for her.