Black and grey botanical tattoo of peonies and roses with leaves and buds across the upper thigh.

Peony and rose cluster on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of peonies and roses with overlapping leaves, buds and small dots forms a bouquet across the outer thigh. The work uses fine, sketchy linework with soft grey shading to suggest petal folds and depth. The tattoo sits in the centre of the frame against plain skin, with a white top and dark fabric at the edges.

Botanical Fine line Thigh Peony Rose Flower Leaves Bud Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peony had been open three days when the rain came, and Ada Sowerby had until dusk to get it on paper. Her father always said a peony sulked if you hurried it, that the outer petals opened first and folded back like sheets left on a line, and that the rose beside it would be over by Thursday whatever anyone did. She sat on the back step of the Hetton Row house with a board across her knees and a pencil behind one ear, working from the bloom in a jam jar on the flags.

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The pit whistle went at two and the street emptied into its washing lines. Her brother Tom came round the side with his snap tin under one arm and coal dust still in the creases of his neck, and he stood over her shoulder without asking. 'The committee want the cup back in the Lodge by Saturday,' he said. 'They'll give it to Mrs Dunn's dahlias if you don't enter.' 'Dad grew this from a cutting he got off a deputy's widow in 1931,' she said. 'It's not for dahlias.' She drew the bud on the left, then the crowded leaves, each one overlapping the next the way the men in the cage had stood shoulder to shoulder on the way down.

By four she had the whole cluster down: two peonies, the rose, three buds that might never open, the leaves turned to show their undersides. She stippled small dots in the gaps where the dew would have sat, though there had been no dew since Monday. Tom read the sheet over her shoulder and said nothing for a long time. Then he carried it inside and laid it flat on the kitchen table, weighted at the corners with the sugar bowl and the wireless.

The rain came at half five and softened the pencil into the board. By morning the flower in the jar had dropped every petal onto the flags, but the sheet kept its shadows, the folds of each bloom still soft and grey, and the dots still waiting for water that had already fallen.