Colour peony tattoo with pink petals and green leaves on the side of a torso and hip, with a small black script tattoo below the bust.

Peony tattoo on side and hip

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A torso in a grey lace bra, with one arm raised, shows a large colour peony with pink petals and green leaves on the side of the ribs, extending down towards the hip and thigh. A small black script tattoo sits below the bust, and its words are not legible. The shading is soft and the image is a close, angled photograph taken indoors.

Botanical Ribs Thigh Peony Flower Leaves Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate has been wrong since Canton. Every morning you lift the lid and count the roots by touch, because Mr Hallam's ledger says eleven and your fingers say ten. Salt has crept into the wet moss, the ship rolls, and the glass sweats. You wipe it with your sleeve before the mate can see.

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The peony was the reason for the whole voyage. Hallam paid a nurseryman outside the city three months' wages for it, and the old man made you swear on his dead wife's name that the roots would never see frost before they saw an English garden. The buds are pink, the colour of the inside of a shell. Lift the moss and there they are, small and tight and certain, like a fist that means to open.

Halfway across the Indian Ocean the missing root turns up in the bilge strainer, pale and split. You tell no one. You wrap it in oilcloth, slip it inside your coat, and carry it against your ribs for the rest of the crossing, feeling it warm there, as if the plant has chosen the one route no customs man would think to search.

At Portsmouth the crate is opened on a wet quay. Hallam counts ten, frowns, and looks at you. You say nothing. He plants the ten in a Chelsea bed in March, and only you know the eleventh went into the earth beside the garden wall that same night, under a rain that did not stop. The following spring one red bloom opens there a week ahead of all the others. When the gardener is asked how it came to be, he shrugs and says it came up by itself, which is the only honest account anyone has ever given of a peony.