Black and grey botanical tattoo of a large peony with leaves, buds and small flowers on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony and botanical cluster on thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large peony sits at the centre of a dense cluster of leaves, buds and smaller flowers, with stems and sprigs radiating outwards. The linework is fine and clean, and the petals and leaves are shaded with stippled dots and soft grey tones. The design fills the thigh in a rounded composition, and the skin is shown in natural light.

Botanical Dotwork Thigh Peony Flower Leaves Bud Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had counted the buds on the peony twice before the whistle went, and she counted them a third time with her hands in the wet soil while the women on the row ran past in their aprons. The bush had been Dan's mother's, carried down from the hill farm in a tin bucket the year they married, and it had never once bloomed in the thirty years it had grown against the back wall of number four. Coal dust settled on its leaves every shift. Nell wiped them with a damp rag each evening, the way her mother had wiped the windows.

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The news came up the lane on a cart. Twelve men were underground at the Deep Seam and the cage had stuck at the third level. Nell did not go to the pit head. She stood at the back wall with the rag in her fist and watched a dark crust of dust lift from the top bud and drift off over the slag heap.

Her neighbour Mrs Gale came round at dusk with a basin of cold water and a pair of tweezers, saying she'd seen the stems had gone black at the joints. Nell took the tweezers and began pulling away the spent leaves and the grit lodged in the sepals, one fine speck at a time, until her fingers were grey to the knuckle.

Dan walked up the lane at first light, blackened to the eyes, his lamp still hanging off his belt. He did not say anything. He stood beside her and looked at the bush. The outer petals had come loose in the night, flushed pink at the edge and creamy at the heart, and the dew sat on them in small clean beads. Nell thought of all the years the dust had settled and nothing had come of it, and she put her hand flat on his chest, over the warm coal on his shirt, and felt him breathe.