Hand-drawn botanical flash design of a pink peony with olive and sage leaves, outlined in black, on white paper beside pens and pencil shavings.

Peony and foliage flash design

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A pale pink peony in full bloom sits at the centre of a loose bouquet of olive and sage green leaves, with a few sprigs of small foliage behind it. The design uses clean black outlines with soft, lightly applied colour washes and fine vein detail on the leaves. Pencil shavings and drawing pens sit on the right of the white page, and a dark grey smudge sits behind the top of the bouquet.

Botanical Peony Flower Leaves Foliage Bouquet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pass was closed by the time Aunt Mair's mule reached the cairn, so we unpacked the drawing case in the lee of a stone wall and I sharpened pencils while the snow thinned to sleet. She wanted the peony down on paper before the light went, the pink bloom at the middle and the olive leaves fanning out like a hand held up to stop something.

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"Leaves first," she said. "Peonies are vain. They'll wait."

I shaved the wood away in one long curl and let it drop on the flagstones, where the wind took it. Sage ink, then the olive wash, the grey-green of the undersides where the leaves turned their backs to the valley. The vein lines I drew with the finest pen we owned, the one Mair had bought in Lyon for a fortune and never let me touch. Above us the rock was black and wet, and a dark smudge of cloud sat behind the peak like something spilled.

Mair took the page from me when the ink dried. She held it up against the grey sky and said the bloom looked as if it might open if the wind changed. I believed her. We had carried two hundred seed packets over that pass in the spring, and every one had been a promise to a garden we would never see.

We walked down with the page buttoned inside my coat, warm against my ribs. At the first village with a window box, I opened the case and found a curl of pencil shaving pressed flat between the sheets. She had left it there on purpose, the way you leave a door unlatched for someone who is coming back.