Black and grey dotwork peony tattoo with leaves across the nape of the neck and back of the head, on a person with a shaved undercut.

Peony tattoo on the nape and back of head

Botanical · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a person's head and neck, with a large peony-style flower and a second overlapping bloom, plus long pointed leaves trailing down towards the neck. The design is built from fine outlines filled with stippled dots, giving soft tonal shading across the petals. The tattoo is entirely black and grey and fills the shaved area at the nape, with the hair pulled up in a bun above.

Botanical Dotwork Neck Peony Flower Leaves Bloom Stipple

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on Gannet Holm had ever seen a peony until Marta Fenn carried one across the sound in a wet sack of peat, the spring her husband took the lamp-keeping post. The rock had no soil worth the name, only lichen, gull grease and a few stubborn thrift plants. Marta dug a hollow behind the fog bell anyway, packed it with seaweed and stove ash, and told Walter that a root which had survived a crossing in a rowing boat could survive anything.

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Walter kept the lamp and the log and did not argue. Through the summer the plant gave only leaves, long and pointed like the blades of a gutting knife, and the gulls walked among them as if they were a joke. The second spring a bud came, then a second beside it, each one tight and furred like a fist. When they opened they were the size of a child's head, heavy and ruffled, petal over petal, grey in the lamplight and white in the day.

In October the fog came down thick for nine days. On the tenth night a fishing smack from Scarrow tried the sound by guesswork, its lantern swinging, and Walter could hear the men shouting at each other over the wash. Marta climbed to the gallery and turned the big lamp, but the fog swallowed the beam at the first fathom. So she went down to the bell, set a candle in a glass jar among the flowers, and the pale heads caught the light and held it, a low white cluster on the black rock.

The smack steered in on that cluster and grounded on the shingle of the cove, not the reef. The crew climbed the path to thank whoever had lit it and found only a woman in a wet coat, counting the drops that ran down the inside of the jar. Walter told the story at every christening for forty years, and he never once got the number right, because Marta never told him what she had been counting.