Black and grey peony with lace-style filigree and hanging beads tattooed on a woman's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony and lace design on the upper back

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large peony bloom sits at the centre of the design, with its petals shaded in soft greys and built up from fine stippled marks. Black lace-like filigree, scrolls and leaves surround the flower, and strings of beads with teardrop pendants hang down from the lower edge. The work is entirely black and grey and spreads diagonally across the upper back and shoulder blade.

Botanical Dotwork Shoulder Back Peony Flower Lace Leaves Bead Droplet Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lace-mender's tent at Wickham Green fair smells of paraffin and wet sawdust, and you have been picking knots out of the same black shawl since the carousel started up at dusk. Madame Orla's shawl has come apart along one scroll, and she wants it back before the second house. You sit on an upturned crate with a pair of tweezers, a tin of jet beads and a candle stub, working the old thread free one loop at a time.

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Ada, who sells toffee apples two stalls down, drops in with two cups of tea and asks why you bother. Nobody will look at the stitching under the stage lights, she says, only at the flower. You tell her the flower is nothing without the lace holding it up, and that the teardrops at the hem must swing, or the whole thing looks like it's standing still. She laughs and says that is exactly what she thinks of the men who come to the fair.

When you finally knot the last bead on, the shawl hangs straight from the pole and the pendants catch the lamplight in a row like falling water. Orla comes in, sees the repair, and does not say thank you. She drapes the wool over her shoulders, turns once before the mirror, and walks out into the noise without a word. You hear the crowd go quiet as she steps into the light.

Later, Ada finds a single jet bead rolling under your crate and presses it into your palm. Keep it, she says, it has been waiting for a better string than this one. You close your fist around it, because the fair always leaves something behind for whoever stays to sweep.