Three views of a colour botanical tattoo on a forearm, showing a pale pink peony with green leaves and fern fronds.

Peony and fern forearm tattoo

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a pale pink peony with shaded petals, surrounded by green leaves and feathery fern fronds that wrap from the elbow towards the wrist. Dark outlines define the petals, leaves and fronds, with soft shading on the flower. The collage shows the forearm from three angles, with the arm bent at the elbow in one panel and the image cropped above the shoulder in another.

Botanical Forearm Peony Rose Fern Leaves Flower Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fern case was the only thing aboard the Thessaly I was not allowed to drop, and by the third week out of Canton I had stopped sleeping on the deck above it. Mr Halloran, the purser, said the damp would rot the silk. I said the damp was the point. Ferns from the Yangtze hills do not survive a sea crossing unless someone sits up with them, and I had promised the man at Kew I would bring back living fronds, not pressed ones.

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The peony was my own foolishness. At a nursery wall outside Guangzhou I bought a single root wrapped in wet sacking, a pale pink thing the old gardener swore would bloom in English soil if it were kept cold in the hold and never let dry. He charged me four silver dollars and laughed when I asked whether it would forgive the salt air.

Somewhere off the Cape the bloom opened in the dark of the hold. I found it at dawn by lantern light, petals the colour of a cheek after a cold wind, the ferns curled round the pot as if they had been waiting to be useful. I sat on an upturned crate and drew them in the back of my log book, fronds and leaves, pressing the pencil hard so the damp would not blur the lines.

When we reached Gravesend, Halloran came down to inspect the silk and found me instead, asleep against the case with one arm across the glass. He did not wake me. The peony went up the hill to Kew in a cart, and I never learned whether it lived. I kept the drawing, though, folded small in the back of the log, its fronds still green on the page.