Colour tattoo of a perched falcon on a branch with pink peonies and pale poppies, across the upper back and shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Perched falcon with peonies on a shoulder blade

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A small falcon with grey wings and a peach-brown breast perches on a leafy branch, with a pale poppy-style bloom above it. Two large pink peonies and another pale flower sit to the right, with dark green leaves trailing down the edge of the design. The linework is dark and defined, with soft shading on the bird and petals, and the composition wraps around the shoulder blade of a person whose face is not in shot.

Botanical Realism Back Shoulder Bird Peony Poppy Flower Leaves Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kestrel came to the market at Sallow Cross every wet morning in March, and every morning old Marjorie Penhale paid it a penny in bread crust for sitting on the rail above her flower stall. Nobody thought much of it. The rain ran off the awning in a steady rope, and the peonies she sold in bunches were heavy-headed and pink as cooked ham, and the customers wanted them wrapped in newspaper before the weather spoiled them.

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In the third week of the wet, a boy from the mill came asking for a single stem of poppy for his mother's grave. Marjorie had none that were fresh, only the pale ones she grew in the back yard, papery and cupped. She gave him one for nothing. The bird watched him go. Then it flew down, took the bread crust from her palm, and sat on the handle of her scale, which it had never done before.

That afternoon the mill boy's mother came by to thank her, and said the boy had gone quiet since the spring, and had asked for a flower that would hold water. Marjorie thought about this for a long time after the stall was closed. In the morning she found the kestrel waiting on the rail with its feathers puffed against the cold, and she tore the bread into smaller pieces than usual, and told it, plainly, that the market would still be here next week.

It was. So was the bird, and so were the peonies, which came back every year in the same pink, and so was the poppy that the boy planted by the gate and watered every day.