Colour botanical tattoo of pink and purple peonies with green leaves and two small butterflies, running down a woman's upper back.

Peony and butterfly vine down the back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A vertical column of peonies runs down the centre of the upper back, with a pink bloom at the top, two purple blooms in the middle, and a coral bloom near the bottom. Dark green leaves and stems link the flowers, and two small butterflies sit either side of the design. The shading is soft and the colours are vivid against the pale skin, with a bright, blurred background.

Botanical Back Peony Flower Butterfly Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at Dover had already unzipped the second bag before Marta thought to explain. Inside, wrapped in damp newspaper from a village near Lyon, were three bare root divisions of a peony her grandmother had kept alive through two harvests and one flood. "They're not for sale," she said. "They're for planting. Pink at the top, then the purple ones, and a coral one to finish."

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The officer, a man with reading glasses pushed up into grey hair, held one of the roots to the strip light. "Pink, purple, coral," he repeated, as if reading out a shopping list. "You've got a form for plant material?"

She did not. She had a letter from the nursery in Lyon, a photograph of the garden wall where the vine climbed, and a sketch drawn on the back of a pharmacy receipt showing where each bloom should sit. Her grandmother had called the arrangement a ladder for butterflies, because the flowers climbed in steps and the butterflies always found the lowest rung first.

He read the letter twice. Then he studied the sketch for a long time, and the photograph, and the wet roots sweating through the newspaper. "My mother had one of these against the back wall," he said at last. "Never flowered for me. Go on, then." He pressed a stamp onto the form, tore it free and slid it across the steel counter without looking up. "Get them in before the frost. And don't let anyone tell you the purple ones need more sun."