Realistic colour tattoo of a pink peony and two buds with green leaves, running along a forearm.

Peony and buds on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large peony bloom sits on the forearm with two closed buds above it and green leaves curling along the lower edge. The petals are shaded with soft gradients from pale pink to deeper purple, with a warm orange-brown centre. The design is set against bare skin on a floral-patterned surface, with the wrist held in a gloved hand at the bottom of the frame.

Realism Botanical Forearm Peony Flower Bud Leaf Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at Lorne Bridge checkpoint turned the bundle over twice before she found the damp sacking round the roots. Three bare peony crowns, pale and knuckled like old potatoes, and a form that said ornamental shrubs in my own careful hand. She held one up to the strip light as if it might confess something.

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'Peonies,' I said. 'My grandmother's. The red ones from the terrace above the mill, the ones that take ten years to bloom properly.' That was true enough. She asked how long they had been out of the ground. Since Tuesday, I said, and that the tailor's wife in Vadu had wrapped them in a tea towel printed with roses, because it was the only cloth in the house nobody needed back.

She was quiet for a long moment. Then she said her mother had kept peonies in a tin bath on a balcony in the city, and every June they split their cardboard boxes of a shed and came up pink regardless of the weather. She asked whether they needed much water. I told her they needed patience, which is what the form should have said, and she stamped it without reading the rest.

Three weeks later I knelt at the wall of the new house and pressed the crowns into soil the colour of wet slate. Nothing showed for a month. Then one morning in May a bud the size of a walnut split its green coat, and I thought of her under the strip light, holding the thing up as though she could see straight through it to spring.