Colour tattoo of peach peonies and purple flowers linked by green Art Nouveau style vines with black outlines, shown in two side-by-side photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony and violet vine on skin

Botanical · Other · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows large peach-orange peonies and purple flowers, with bell-shaped blooms at the lower edge, all joined by long, looping green stems. Bold black outlines define the petals and vines, with flat colour fills and light shading inside the peony petals. The two photos show the same piece from slightly different angles, with the flowers filling most of the frame.

Botanical Other Peony Flower Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nights on Ward 14 smell of hand gel and cold tea, so when Mr Okafor's daughter came in at half eleven with a carrier bag I assumed it was the usual: a phone charger, a pair of slippers. Instead she unwrapped a bundle of peonies from the Co-op, peach-orange and heavy-headed, their stems wrapped in damp newspaper. "Dad wanted them where he could see them," she said. "He used to draw these on the backs of invoices."

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I found a jug in the sluice room and filled it at the sink, cutting the stems at an angle the way my nan taught me, though nobody has ever taught me to arrange flowers properly. The peonies were too big for the jug, so I laid the spares along the windowsill. The violets she had bought as an afterthought from the garage forecourt, and I tucked those into a yoghurt pot beside his bed where the light from the car park would catch them.

He stayed awake for a while after that, watching the stems. Around three his breathing changed in the way I have learned to notice, slower, with gaps in it. His daughter had gone down to the machine on the ground floor for a coffee. I sat on the edge of the chair and counted the loops of green that the vine made against the blind, following one curl with my finger in the air until it wound back on itself, the way his drawings always did.

When the day staff came on at seven the jug was still full and the petals had dropped only at their edges. I wrote it up in the handover book in three lines, and then, because nobody reads that section, I drew the vine underneath in biro, looping all the way out to the margin.