Realistic colour tattoo of a pink peony, blue forget-me-nots and dark green leaves on the ankle and lower leg.

Peony and forget-me-not bouquet on an ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Colour · Photo

A bouquet of flowers covers the outside of the ankle and lower leg, centred on a large pink peony with soft, layered petals. Clusters of small blue forget-me-nots with pale centres sit behind it, with smaller pink blooms and dark green leaves filling the gaps and a stem trailing down the leg. The work uses smooth shading and soft gradients for a realistic effect, with mostly colour ink and some dark greens and greys in the leaves.

Botanical Realism Ankle Peony Forget-me-not Flower Bouquet Leaves Stem Blossom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peonies came aboard at Hull in a crate meant for tinned peaches, and Cook Haddow swore at them all the way down the gangway. "Peonies are for weddings and funerals," he said, "and a galley has no business with either." I was nineteen, on my first voyage as galley boy, and I got stuck with the wet paper and the bucket.

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The forget-me-nots were the second mate's idea. He'd bought them off a barrow by the fish market, a fistful of blue wrapped in brown paper, and asked me to keep them cool in the meat safe until the Rotterdam run. "For Ada," he said, tapping the parcel. "Her birthday's the Tuesday after we dock." He winked, which was the most I'd seen him do in three weeks.

Somewhere off the Dogger Bank the sea got up, and the meat safe door swung open in the night. By morning the forget-me-nots had gone limp and grey at the edges, and the peony had dropped half its petals onto the stove top, where they curled like pink paper. Haddow scraped them into the slop bucket without a word. I kept the stems. I fixed them in a jam jar with a dash of vinegar and sugar, the way my mother did, and set them on the chart table where the mate would see them first.

He never mentioned them. On the Tuesday he came down for his tea, looked at the jar a long time, then took one blue head between finger and thumb and pressed it into the back of his logbook, where it left a faint stain like a thumbprint. "Keep them, lad," he said. "Ada will want the card, not the flowers."