Colour botanical tattoo of a peach peony, small white flowers, ferns and blackberries across a forearm, photographed from the wrist side.

Peony and wildflower bouquet on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large peach-toned bloom, resembling a peony, sits at the centre of a bouquet that also includes small white five-petalled flowers, fern fronds, green leaves and clusters of blackberries. The linework is fine and dark, with soft shading in the petals and leaves. Muted peach, sage green and dusky berry tones fill the design, which wraps up the forearm towards the elbow and is shown with the hand relaxed at the wrist.

Botanical Forearm Peony Flower Wildflower Fern Leaves Blackberry Bouquet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bramble hedges along the Nick track were heavy by the second week of August, and Tomasz stopped the cart at every bend to fill his cap, swearing softly in Polish whenever the thorns caught his sleeve. I walked behind with the ledger and the ink bottle, counting fleeces against the carter's list, because my father had lost two loads to Mr Hallam's bookkeeping and would not lose a third.

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At the top of the pass, where the wind came over the col with nothing to stop it, old Mrs Raine kept a cottage with a walled garden no bigger than a kitchen table. She grew peonies up there that had no business surviving the height, great blush-coloured heads that bowed to the flagstones after rain. She gave me a cutting in exchange for a bag of salt and told me the ferns in the wall crevices were the only things on that hill that knew how to hold on.

Hallam's man rode up in September with a letter claiming the third load was short. I opened every sack in her yard while he watched. The count was right, every fleece of it. The shortfall was in Hallam's own tally, a column added wrong, and I wrote the correction out in the ledger in my neatest hand. The man went back down the pass without his dinner. Mrs Raine laughed until she coughed and pressed a jar of bramble jelly into my coat pocket.

I planted the cutting by our back step that autumn. The peony still comes up pale every June, and the brambles have run over the wall where Tomasz filled his cap, so every August I walk that track again with a jar of jelly in my bag and count everything twice.