Colourful Japanese-style peony and mountain tattoo on a thigh, with partial lettering, beside a tea box on a white rug.

Peony and mountain thigh tattoo

Japanese · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A red peony with dark outlines covers the upper part of the thigh, with partly visible lettering below it. Lower down, a blue-green mountain shape sits among dark green leaves, with an orange area at the bottom edge of the frame. The leg is shown from the side against a fluffy white rug, with a heart-printed box and tea sachets to the left.

Japanese Thigh Peony Mountain Lettering Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been pricking the same blue ink into a card for three days when Mr Varga finally looked up from his ledger and said the peony would never sell unless the mountain behind it was made to look as if it had been there first. She had painted the flower too red, he said, and the red wanted something cold to lean against.

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She climbed the ridge above the village that Sunday with a satchel of brushes and a jar of pigment ground from the blue clay of the old quarry. The peonies in the abandoned nursery had been planted by a monk who had left a note under a flagstone, a single word in Italian, LIBERO, and nothing else. Nell had taken it for an instruction about the soil. Halfway up the path the wind dropped, and she found the outline of a mountain already traced on the rock in pale lichen, as if someone had sketched it in advance and gone home.

She sat with her back against a larch and painted until the light turned orange along the ridge. When she walked back down, the peony in her case had darkened to the colour of a bruised plum, and the card looked wrong in a way she liked. Mr Varga held it to the window for a long time. Then he laughed, short and surprised, and said the flower had finally stopped apologising for being there.