Black and grey peony tattoo with ornate mandala-style leaves on a person's ribs, in a Botanical style with dotwork shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony with mandala leaves on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large peony flower sits on the side of the ribcage, surrounded by ornate, lace-like leaves and filled with fine dots and stippling. The shading is black and grey, with soft gradients on the petals and crisp outlines defining the bloom and foliage. The subject is photographed from behind against a blurred urban background, with the tattoo as the clear focal point.

Botanical Dotwork Ribs Peony Flower Leaves Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mags,

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The auction man from Harrogate came on Tuesday and took the last of Dad's peony roots in a wooden crate, and he didn't even look at the drawing I'd pinned above the potting bench. Sixty years that bed has been there, and nobody wants the plant without the paperwork. I stippled every petal of that sketch with the dip pen Dad used for labels, one dot at a time, because you can't hurry a bloom that wants to open slowly. My fingers went numb by the third leaf.

Here's the thing I haven't told you. The peony in the drawing is the white one from the north bed, the one Mum swore would never flower outside a gasworks. It flowered only once, the summer you left, and I sat on the step counting its dark buds like rosary beads. I wanted it on paper before the frost took it, so I did, and the lace leaves were me being greedy with the nib, curling them the way frost curls on the glass.

Last Thursday I went to clear the cold frame and found a shoot pushing up through the gravel where the crate had stood. Pale, fat, folded tight as a fist. It has no business being there, the roots were all lifted. I've left it be. I'm not writing to ask you home, only to say the bud is opening enough now to see its centre, and it looks exactly like the dot I put in the middle of the drawing, the last one I made, when my hand was steady.

Love, Hen