Black and grey botanical tattoo of a peony with leaves on a forearm, shaded with dotwork stippling.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony and leaves on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large peony bloom with layered petals and two smaller leaves sits across the forearm, which runs diagonally from upper left to lower right. The outlines are bold and the petals and leaves are filled with fine dots and soft grey shading to create depth. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against a dark background.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Peony Flower Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bulbs came over from a nursery in Lincolnshire in a crate that also held the lion's old collar, and nobody expected them to take. Pell's Travelling Company was down to two elephants, a wire-walker with bad knees and a big top patched so often it was more patch than canvas. Ada Pell pushed the bulbs into the earth at the edge of the ring anyway, where the sawdust gave way to mud, and told her husband to leave them be.

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They came up in the second week of June. By the end of the month the peony stood taller than the ticket box, its outer petals broad as a child's hand and the inner ones folded tight, one over another, like something being kept secret. Word went round the villages faster than any poster. People walked in from the farms to see the flower, then stayed for the show, then paid for the show. Silas Pell, who had counted the takings every night for thirty years, began to talk about selling the root to a man in Boston who collected rare things.

Ada said nothing. On the night before the sale a hard frost came down out of a clear sky, and in the morning every bloom had gone the colour of stewed tea. She cut the last open flower anyway and set it in a jar on the wire-walker's trunk, because he had asked her for something beautiful to look at through the winter.

The company packed up that week and went north with the elephants walking at the back. Ada kept one dried petal folded inside the ticket book. Whenever they stopped in a new town she unfolded it on the box and looked at the fine grey dots where the light had caught it, and she did not mention selling anything again.