Black and grey fine line peony and rose tattoo with leaves and a sprig across a thigh, with a hand holding grey shorts.

Peony and roses on the thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large peony and two smaller roses with leaves and a fern-like sprig run across the outer thigh and upper leg. The tattoo uses clean outlines with light, sparing shading in black and grey ink. The skin is shown in a close, slightly angled photo against white bedding, with the hand and grey shorts framing the design.

Botanical Fine line Thigh Peony Rose Flower Leaves Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peony came out of the ground the week before the first hard frost, and my uncle would not let me carry it to the new bed myself. He wrapped the root ball in wet sacking and tied it with baler twine, the way he tied everything that mattered, then set it in the cab of the Land Rover like a sleeping dog. Ashcombe Farm had been sold that autumn, and the new people wanted the front garden levelled for a gravel drive, so every plant worth saving was coming up the lane with us.

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The roses went next. There were two bushes against the yard wall, leggy and grey, and nobody had pruned them properly since Nan died. We dug them out with the fork while our breath hung between us, and I cut a stem of the fern-like tansy from the edge of the border because she had always kept a sprig of it in a jam jar by the sink. The leaves were stiff with rime and snapped like biscuit when I bent them.

We planted all of it in the top field, in the lee of the old barn, where the ground drained well enough to forgive us. Uncle Ted said the peony would not flower for a year. It needed a proper winter first, he said, the way a man needs a proper night's sleep before he can be any use to anybody. I thought he was talking about the peony.

In late May the first bud split open at the centre of the bush, pale and tightly folded, like linen that had been ironed and put away in a drawer for years. He came out with a mug of tea and stood at the wall with his cap in his hand, saying nothing, while the rose beside it began to open too.