Colour botanical tattoo on a shoulder and upper arm showing red peonies, white blossoms, raspberries and green leaves in a neo-traditional style with black outlines.

Peony and raspberry sleeve on shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo is a floral sleeve of large red and pink peonies, a cluster of small white five-petalled blossoms and trailing raspberries with green leaves. The linework is bold and black, with soft blended shading in the petals and smooth colour fills in the leaves and berries. The design wraps from the top of the shoulder down the upper arm, with the flowers densest at the centre of the arm.

Botanical Neo-trad Shoulder Upper arm Peony Rose Blossom Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The raspberry canes had come up through the wall of the old kelp store again, and Morag said they were the island's way of reminding the household who had planted the first ones. Nobody had planted them. The wind had brought them, the way it brought everything to Sule: salt, seed, a drowned man's hat once, and the odd stubborn woman who would not leave.

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Her mother's mother had kept the peonies. They grew in a ring around the well, red as the inside of a mussel, and the old women said they would not flower unless somebody sang to them in the evenings. So every night for a summer Morag sang badly to a patch of dirt while the fishing boats came in against the light. The petals opened, but only after the white blossoms of the wild rose had covered the north wall, and that was the year the mainland man came with his surveyor's chain and his promise of a road.

He measured the island in a single afternoon. He wanted the well filled and the ring dug out for a cement path. Morag stood between him and the spade, and he laughed at her, and the raspberries shook on their canes as though the wind had got into them.

The road was never built. The surveyor went back on the ferry with a scratched hand and a story about thorns. On Sule they still say that when the red flowers come out heavy at midsummer, the berries will not ripen unless someone has been singing.