Black line tattoo of peonies and leaves on an upper arm, botanical style, with a partial bird tattoo visible on the forearm below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony and rose bouquet on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large black linework tattoo of two peony blooms, a rosebud and sprigs of leaves wraps around the upper arm. The lines are bold and even, with fine hatching and stippled shading in the petals and leaves, and the design is set against bare skin with no colour. A partly visible grey shaded bird tattoo sits lower on the forearm at the left edge of the frame.

Botanical Upper arm Forearm Peony Rose Rosebud Leaves Flower Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peonies came out the week the winding gear at Hollin Pit stopped for good, which Mrs Greaves thought a poor sort of courtesy from the earth. She had been out since five with a knife and a bucket, cutting the heavy heads before the rain could split them, and the whole rowed garden behind number nine smelled of wet paper and something sweeter underneath.

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Her husband Walter had kept pigeons in the loft above the coal house for thirty years, grey birds with a dull shine on the neck, and when the men were laid off he sat up there in his good shirt and talked to them as if they were foremen. He had died in March of a chest the pit had given him. The loft door hung open now and nobody had the heart to shut it.

The rosebud was the one she didn't cut. Walter had rooted that bush from a slip given him by a deputy's wife, and it had grown up through the broken fence, pushing at the sun as if nobody had told it about the slag heaps. Tommy Pell from the end house came over the wall with his cap in his hand, asking if he could take a bloom for his mam, and she gave him the biggest peony and told him to mind the petals.

That evening she carried the last bucket up the loft steps and set it on the sill. A grey pigeon came in low through the open door, looked at the flowers for a long moment, then settled beside them as though it had been asked to keep watch.