Black and grey dotwork peony with leaves on a person's upper arm, with a partial moth tattoo visible below it.

Peony and leaves on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large peony flower with layered petals and a shaded centre fills the upper arm, surrounded by pointed leaves. The petals are built from fine linework and stippled dotwork shading that gives them depth. The image is a close, slightly soft crop of the arm against a dark top, with a partly visible moth tattoo lower down.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Peony Flower Leaves Moth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming off the canopies all morning in ropes, and by eleven the stalls on Brindley Row smelt of wet cardboard and cut stems. Mrs Okonedo kept her peonies in buckets under the tarpaulin at the far end, where the drip came through in a steady tick on the rim of a galvanised bath. I bought the last three from her for a pound each because they were going over, their outer petals browning like old paper, and she told me a peony opens when it is ready, not when you are.

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I set them in a jug on my windowsill, and for four days nothing happened. On the fifth morning the middle one had split its tight green bud into a crumpled rose-pink fist, and by evening it had unfolded layer after layer, each petal folding back on itself like a letter someone had reread too many times. I sat with a pencil and tried to draw it, shading the dark heart with dots because my lines kept rushing ahead of me.

That night a moth came in through the open sash, drawn to the lamp, and settled on the wall above the jug. Its wings were the colour of wet slate. I watched it for an hour without moving, thinking how the flower had wanted nothing from anyone except water and time, and how the moth wanted only the light, and neither of them had been asked whether they would rather be somewhere else.

The next market day I went back to Brindley Row with the drawing folded in my coat pocket. Mrs Okonedo looked at it under the dripping tarp, then at me, and said the peonies were finished for the year. I stood a while longer in the rain, listening to it tick on the bath, until she told me I was letting the damp in and I should go and dry out.