Black and grey botanical tattoo of two peony flowers and leaves on a forearm, shown in a close view and a wider view with a hand.

Peony and leaves on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two large peony blooms with layered petals, surrounded by several leaves and a stem that runs up the forearm. The outlines are dark and fairly bold, with the leaves and some petal areas filled with fine shading and stippled texture. The image is in black and grey only, with a close view on the left and a wider view on the right, where a hand is raised in front of a light background.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Peony Flower Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Hollis had been dead nine days when the frost came early to the back beds, and I went out before breakfast with the good secateurs in my apron pocket, expecting nothing but blackened stalks. He had always said the old crimson double was finished, that the root had gone soft in the wet winter of '29, and he had said it so often that I stopped looking at that corner of the nursery at all.

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But the foliage was there, glossy and red-tipped, pushing up between the sodden straw like someone who had been told to wait indoors. I knelt in the mud and dug with my fingers. The crown was firm and pale as a knuckle. Tucked into the wet soil beside it was his tin of pencils and a ledger page folded small, with a row of sketched petals drawn so carefully that each one had its own little fold of shadow.

I was angry for about a minute, at a dead man who kept his best secret under the straw. Then I stopped being angry, because the page was a list of crosses, eleven years of them, each line ending in a question mark, and the last one read: Ada, if the old one lives, give her the bed and let her name it.

I cut the first bloom in June. It opened slowly, layer over layer, the outer petals loose as a coat and the centre cupped tight like a hand holding water. I didn't name it after him. I named it after the frost, which had not managed to kill it.