Colour tattoo of a peony, green leaves and a butterfly wrapping up a forearm, in soft pink and green with grey shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony and butterfly on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large peony bloom sits near the wrist with several leaves and a small butterfly towards the elbow, all wrapped around the forearm. The linework is fine and the petals are softly shaded with pale pink and grey, while the leaves use muted green tones. The arm is photographed against a blurred background, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Botanical Neo-trad Forearm Peony Flower Leaves Butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Harker kept the signal box at Ashby Cross for thirty-one years, and in all that time nobody saw him water anything but the peony. It sat in a jam jar on the sill, a cutting from the walled garden of the house they had pulled down, and each morning before the first up train he moved it a finger's width toward the glass, the way another man might touch his cap.

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The old women in the village said the flower had come from a bride's bouquet, and that it would only bloom while someone at the crossing was waiting for a person who was not coming. Harker laughed at that, mostly. But the peony opened in the second week of March, pale pink going grey at the edges, the colour of a sky before rain, and that same week a butterfly came in through the open door and settled on the lever frame as if it had bought a ticket.

It stayed all day. Harker pulled four goods trains and a late passenger without once taking his eyes off it, and when the evening freight went through, the glass hummed and the petals shivered and the butterfly lifted, circled the jar twice, and went out over the points into the green dusk.

Harker wrote in the register that night: Peony in bloom. Visitor departed on the 6.40. Then he crossed out departed and wrote returned, though he could not have said to whom.