Black and grey dotwork peony tattoo with leaves on the upper chest near the collarbone.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony tattoo on the upper chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large peony bloom with layered petals and two leaves sits on the upper chest. The outlines are dark and fine, and the petals and centre are built up with stippled dotwork shading in greys. The flower is centred on the frame against plain pale skin, with a plaid shirt and loose hair at the edge of the shot.

Dotwork Botanical Chest Peony Flower Leaves Bloom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The copperplate had waited three weeks for the peony, because Mr Dacre would not let me stipple a flower he had not held. So on the Tuesday he carried a cut bloom up from the Covent Garden barrow, wrapped in wet newspaper, set it on the bench beside my lamp, and told me to count the petals before I touched the steel.

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I worked in dots. A stipple is nothing but the point of a needle pressed again and again, a hundred thousand small kisses of metal, and the grey comes from how closely you let them crowd. The outer petals I kept light, nearly bare paper, so they seemed to lift off the plate and curl. The heart I crowded until it went almost black, because Dacre said the middle of a peony is where the flower keeps its secrets, and nobody should be able to read them from across the room.

By the end of March the proofs were pulled and the catalogue went to press with my initials in the small type under the plate. Dacre died that summer of a chest complaint in a rented room in Bloomsbury. His widow sent me the bench lamp and a cutting of the peony rooted in a jam jar, which I have kept on the sill ever since and which has never once flowered.

Last week a photograph of the same bloom came through on my phone, pressed into someone's skin in grey dots, the centre crowded black exactly as Dacre had wanted. I had never imagined a plate could walk out of its book. I sat with the lamp off and the jam jar in my lap until the dots blurred into one soft shadow, and I thought that the flower had finally found a place where it could stay open.