Colour realism tattoo of peonies and leaves with watercolour splashes and drips, placed on the back.

Peony cluster with watercolour drips on back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A cluster of layered peony blooms and buds with green leaves sits at the centre of the design, with a small bud near the top. Fine, detailed shading gives the petals depth, while loose pink, purple and blue splashes and trailing drips spread outward and downward. The palette is dominated by magenta, plum, pink and teal, and the design is set on a pale area of skin.

Botanical Realism Back Peony Flower Bud Leaves Watercolour splash Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came through the big top at four in the morning and found the peony I had been painting on the side of the waltzer for three weeks. Dad stood in the mud with his torch, swearing at the tarpaulin, while I knelt on a crate and watched magenta run down the board in long plum fingers. Nobody else on the lot would have stopped for it. I did.

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The waltzer was called The Peacock Belle, and its owner, Mrs Ostrowska, wanted fat pink roses like the ones painted on the tea urns in Margate. I had given her roses for two summers. This year I had a jar of pigment my grandmother mixed from crushed petals and gum arabic, the colour of a bruise going yellow at the edges, and I had decided the flowers should look like they were already coming apart.

By dawn the bloom in the centre had bled into the teal sky behind it, and the bud at the top had sprouted a red splash like a cut lip. Mrs Ostrowska came down the caravan steps in her dressing gown, ready to shout, and stopped with her hand on the rail. She looked at it for a long time. Then she asked what the rain had cost her, and I said nothing, because I didn't know yet.

We left the drips. That afternoon Dad hung the lamps on the rig and the ride rolled out along the coast road towards Skegness with three peonies sinking down its flank. Children at every stop asked me whether the flowers were crying. I told them they were only wet, which was true, and that some things look better once the weather has had a go at them.