Back of a woman with blonde hair in a bun, showing a colourful botanical tattoo of peonies, leaves and two small butterflies running down the spine.

Peony and rose vine down the spine

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A vertical arrangement of peonies runs down the centre of the back, with a pink bloom at the top, three purple blooms in the middle and a coral rose at the base. Dark green leaves and stems link the flowers, and two small blue-green butterflies sit beside the upper blooms. The shading is soft and painterly, with colour blended into the petals, and the subject is framed against a bright, pale background.

Botanical Back Peony Rose Flower Leaves Butterfly Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peony roots arrived on the Tuesday ferry in a wooden crate packed with wet newspaper, so I unpacked them on the kitchen table because it was the only surface on Hallan that stayed dry in the gales. Mrs Orr's husband had ordered them from a nursery in Perth before he died, three purple, one pink, and a rose cutting wrapped separately in brown paper with a coral tag. His handwriting ran down the label like a row of stitches. Plant them in a line up the south dyke, it said, so she can see them from the window.

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I set them in the lee of the wall, where the wind curled round the stones and dropped its salt on everything. Spring came late that year. The shoots bunched tight as fists and stayed that way through April, and Mrs Orr sat at her window with her tea going cold and asked me every morning whether anything had moved. Then one afternoon two blue-green butterflies came over from the Hebrides, the kind that cross in a good wind, and settled on the warm stone beside the pink bud. I stood very still so they wouldn't go. Afterwards I felt foolish for holding my breath over insects.

The first bloom opened on the day the ferry came back, the pink one at the top, its petals loose and crumpled like a letter read too often. Mrs Orr came down the path with her stick, took a long look at the wall, and said she had wanted the coral rose at the top, not the bottom, because roses always opened last and she liked to be surprised. Then she told me to move it, just a yard, so the sea could see it from the boat.

We dug the hole together in the wet soil while the gulls argued over the harbour. She pressed the rose cutting into my palm before I could refuse it, her fingers cold and sure. Put that one where the sea can see it, she said, and went back inside before I could answer.