Black and grey peony tattoo with leaves on the upper arm of a person in a black vest top, shown in a black and white photo.

Peony and leaves on the upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey peony bloom with surrounding leaves is tattooed on the upper arm, near the elbow. The petals are outlined in fine, crisp linework, and the leaves and shaded areas are built up with stippled dots and light grey tones. The arm is raised against a plain pale wall, and the composition is a black and white photo centred on the tattoo.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Peony Flower Leaves Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peonies at Carrow Keep had been left to themselves for thirty years, and by June they had swallowed the walled garden whole. I went in through the postern gate with a pair of shears my father had left hanging on a nail in the gatehouse, and the first bloom I found was the size of a child's head, heavy enough to bow its stem into the nettles. Its petals were folded like the pleats of a good coat, one inside another, and where the rain had got under them they had gone the colour of wet slate.

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Mrs Ansell at the village shop said the old Lady Carrow planted them the summer her son went north with the militia. The roots came from a nursery in Ghent in a crate of wet sawdust, and the Lady walked the paths each evening counting buds like beads. When the telegram came in autumn she had the gate chained and never opened it again. I told Mrs Ansell that sounded like a story. She said everything in Carrow was a story, which was the trouble with it.

I cut the big bloom at the base, wrapped it in an old Ordnance Survey map, and climbed the stair to the east tower where the wind came through the arrow slits. The leaves had crept up the stonework and pressed the mortar with dark dots of shadow, like the marks a pen leaves when it rests too long on one spot. I laid the flower on the sill, and for a while the only movement was the petals loosening one at a time, each letting go of the next.

When I came down, the gate stood open, propped with a brick so the path stayed clear. I didn't ask who. I left the bloom where it was, and in the morning there was another one on the sill, pale against the stone, already half unfolded.