Black and grey botanical tattoo of peonies and leaves across a person's side over the ribs, with dotwork shading.

Peony and leaves on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A side view of a torso showing a large black and grey tattoo of peony flowers, one fully open and one partly open, with a smaller blossom and leaves. The outlines are bold and the petals are shaded with fine stippling and dotwork, giving soft tonal gradation. The tattoo fills the ribcage area, with the leaves trailing down towards the hip, against a pale, out-of-focus studio background.

Botanical Dotwork Ribs Peony Flower Leaves Blossom Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and stop fidgeting with those bottles. I'm getting to the frost. You can't tell about the peony wall without the frost, because the frost is what turned everything to ink that winter, when the nursery on Coldharbour Lane burned down to its brick and Ada Penhallow came up the hill with a tin of cuttings buttoned inside her coat.

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She had nowhere to plant them but the old chapel yard, where the headstones were so black with soot you could not read a name. Every morning she went out with a flask of tea and a paper twist of engraving pins, the fine ones Mr Greaves used for the brass plates, and she pricked the dark earth into petals. Not with a trowel, mind. With her thumb, one dot at a time, until the bed looked more like a drawing than a garden. The vicar thought she had lost her wits. The children thought she was counting.

By March the first bloom opened, big as a fist and heavy as a dropped coat, and then a second, and then a third that split all at once, the way a bad temper does. People came up from the bus stop to look. Mr Greaves came himself, leaning on his stick, and stood a long while in front of the wall. He said it was a handsome thing, the way the shadow gathered in the folds, but that anyone could grow a white flower. It was the dark that took the work.

Ada never answered him. She bent, took one bloom in her cold hands and held it out, and he saw she had cut the stem and bound it with black thread, and that the heart of it was all dots, thousands of them, each one pressed in by a thumb. Tell me, she said, which of us has the steadier hand. Well. That's the end of the story, and the end of my tea.