Colour tattoo of peony flowers and leaves with black linework and pink and purple wash shading, placed on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony cluster on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a cluster of three peony flowers with a smaller bud and dark green leaves, arranged diagonally up the leg. Fine black outlines define the petals and leaves, with grey shading inside the forms. Soft pink, magenta and blue washes bleed around the flowers, with thin red drips running down the lower leaves.

Botanical Thigh Peony Flower Leaves Bud Petal Watercolour wash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peonies in the walled bed started to bleed in the third week of May. That was Dad's word for it, the red water that ran off the stems after a hard shower and pooled in the gravel under the wall. He had been dead four years and I still wrote it in the ledger every spring, under the weather: rain, wind, bleeding.

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Nobody else wanted the bed. The fair had come through the village in August, the big wheel stuck on the green with its lights off, and a girl from the caravans had asked me for something to put in her hair for the dance. I cut her a bunch without thinking. She pressed her face into the pink as if it were warm, and there was blue paint dried on her fingers from the coconut stall. Her name was Sunny, or it might have been Sonny. I never asked which.

Dad grew the magenta ones from a cutting his mother smuggled out of a convent garden in Lyon. The petals are heavy as wet paper, and the buds stay hard as knuckles until the first warm day. I learned to lift the roots in October and wrap them in sacking, and to keep the grey-green cuttings clear of frost. Every summer someone asked whether the flowers were real or painted.

The girl came back on the last night of the fair, the wheel dark behind her, red drips down the front of her shirt. She asked if the bleeding was supposed to happen. I said it was. I dug up the oldest plant, shook the soil from its roots, and handed her a tight green bud with a single leaf still on it. Put it on a sill that gets the afternoon, I told her, and wait for the heat.