Black line tattoo of peonies and leafy stems on the outer thigh, in a botanical style.

Peony stem tattoo on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black line tattoo of peony blooms, buds and leaves climbs up the outer thigh along a curving stem. The linework is single-weight and outlined, with little or no shading, and the ink is dark grey to black. The photo is taken indoors in dim light, with a red skirt and red lace underwear visible beside the tattoo.

Botanical Thigh Peony Flower Leaves Stem Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peony nursery at Hollin Cross had been shut since the spring frost took the top beds, and nobody had told the old stems they could stop trying. You walk the rows with a pair of secateurs and a torn seed catalogue, counting the buds that have swollen under their brown papery coats. Mrs Adair, who ran the place for forty years, used to say a peony was a flower that needed to be argued into opening. You never believed her until the third week of May, when you found a bloom the size of a fist pushing through the wet soil beside the wall, its stem bent in a question mark as if it had been looking for something.

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You cut it carefully and carry it to the potting shed, where the light comes through a cracked pane in thin grey bars. The petals are heavy and ruffled, folded in on themselves like a letter written three times over. Beside the bloom a leaf has curled into a cup, and a smaller bud hangs below it, closed tight, not yet willing. You set the stem in a jam jar of rainwater and sit on the upturned crate to wait, the way Mrs Adair taught you, with your hands in your lap and no pulling.

By evening the bloom has loosened by a single petal. You do not touch it. In the morning the whole head has opened, dense and pale and full of small crimped centres, and the bud beneath has begun to swell. You pick up the secateurs, then set them down again on the sill. Some things, Mrs Adair said, you only have to stand near long enough to see them through.