Black and grey dotwork peony with geometric flower motifs across the forearm, photographed against a brick wall.

Peony and geometric florals on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large peony bloom with layered petals sits at the wrist end of the forearm, with a smaller geometric star-like floral motif rising towards the elbow. The petals and centre are built from fine linework with stippled dot shading that fades into the skin above the design. The design is in black and grey ink and is framed against a red brick wall.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Forearm Peony Flower Mandala Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your grandfather would not let the peony go into the ground until the frost had finished with the back wall, and I have never known a plant so stubborn about being planted. Three autumns he dug, three springs it sulked, all leaf and no bloom. Meanwhile the frost came every morning to the kitchen window and drew its little star-flowers across the glass, each one with its spokes counted out as neatly as a clockmaker's wheel. He said the frost was showing off. I said it was practising.

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Then in the fourth year, when we had given up and I had gone out with the shears to take the dead canes off the wall, I found one bud split open at the base of the old brick, pale as a fold of lamb's tongue and so tightly ruffled it looked stitched. I stood there with my hand on my hip and called him out. He came in his socks. We knelt together in the wet clay and looked at it for a long time without a word, the way you look at a letter you already know will say something you have been waiting to hear.

Afterwards he took a fine pen to the window glass and copied the frost in ink, dot by dot, while I pressed the petals of the bloom into the margins of the seed book. That is where the drawing lives now, at the back of the book between the rhubarb and the leeks. The frost has long since stopped coming to the window, but the peony has never once failed to open.

Your mother says we should have moved it years ago. Come up in May and tell her she is wrong.