Colour botanical tattoo of a peony with green leaves and a small butterfly on a forearm, with a striped top in the background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony and butterfly on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large peony bloom in soft pink and peach sits on the forearm, surrounded by dark green leaves and stems. A small orange and yellow butterfly rests on a bud at the upper edge of the design. The shading is soft and blended, with fine outlines, and the design wraps around the arm against a plain grey wall.

Botanical Forearm Peony Flower Leaves Butterfly Stem Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tent went up on the common outside Ashby in the second week of September. There were four performers left, two grey horses, a clown who also drove the lorry, and a tin pail of peony roots that Nell Gorry had carried from her mother's yard in Lincolnshire forty years before. Nobody had the heart to throw it out, so it sat on the step of the caravan, and by the second week it had one bud the size of a walnut.

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The ringmaster, Silas Trent, had sold the big top's centre poles to a scrapyard in March. Each evening he stood at the edge of the sawdust and counted the audience aloud. Eleven on Monday. Nine on Tuesday. On Wednesday a small brown moth blundered in through the flap and settled on the bud, and Nell said that was a sign, and Silas said moths were only moths, and the bud stayed shut.

On Friday there were six people in the seats, two of them asleep. Silas went out to the step with his wages in his pocket, which was nothing, and found Nell sitting with her knees up, talking to the bud as if it owed her money. Its petals had split in the night. The bloom was pink going to peach at the edges, wide as a saucer, and a butterfly the colour of marmalade was resting on the rim of the pail, opening and shutting its wings.

They carried the pail into the ring between the acts and set it in the sawdust. The butterfly lifted, circled the lamps once, and went out through the flap into the dark. Nobody in the stands clapped. They all stood up anyway, to see where it had gone.