Neo-traditional peony and bud tattoo with green leaves and black outlines, placed on the forearm.

Peony and bud on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A pink peony in full bloom sits on the forearm, with a closed bud above it and sprawling green leaves trailing down the arm. Bold black outlines define the petals, leaves and veins, with soft pink and blush shading across the petals and yellow stamens at the centre. The composition wraps diagonally along the forearm, with the flower near the upper half and the foliage tapering towards the wrist.

Neo-trad Botanical Forearm Peony Flower Bud Leaves Stamen Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peony came over on the Tuesday boat in a tea chest packed with wet newspaper, and by the time Agnes Lusk had carried it up the shingle path to the glasshouse, two of its leaves had already gone the colour of old brass. Nobody on Skerra grew peonies. The north wind took the tops off anything taller than a cabbage, and salt got into everything. The card tucked under the lid said the root had been dug from a garden in Pitlochry before the house was sold, and would whoever received it please keep it alive until March.

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She planted it in the sandy bed against the sea wall, under a pane of glass her father had salvaged from a wrecked trawler. Through the autumn she fed it seaweed ash and talked to it the way her mother had talked to the hens. The bud came in February, a tight pink fist on a stem no thicker than a pencil, and she spent three weeks watching it swell while the storms rattled the glass and the gulls quarrelled on the roof.

It opened on a morning when the sea lay flat for once and the ferry horn sounded twice. The bloom was wider than her palm, pale at the edges and deepening to rose at the heart, with a crown of gold stamens that looked like someone had dusted them with pollen from a far-off county. Agnes stood in the doorway in her wellingtons and did not go to fetch the kettle.

That evening she wrote to the address on the card. She did not say the flower had made it, or that she had sat up two nights with a torch in case the frost came. She pressed one petal flat between two sheets of blotting paper, slid it into the envelope, and wrote underneath, in careful capitals, IT KEPT.