Colour tattoo of pink, cream and purple flowers with green leaves and buds running down the inside of a forearm, held up against a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink and cream flowers on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A raised forearm and hand are shown against a plain white background, with the hand's fingers extended upward. Painted-style blooms in cream-yellow, coral-pink and violet, with green leaves and a rosebud near the wrist, trail from the inner forearm towards the elbow. Soft shading and fine detail give the petals depth, and the bright colours stand out clearly against the pale skin.

Botanical Forearm Flower Rose Bud Leaf Peony

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Fenwick had been warned twice by the vicar that the peony would not survive the frost, and twice she went out in her coat before dawn and knocked the rime from its stems with the back of a wooden spoon. The garden behind the post office in Tanner's Row was small, but it held everything she had: three rows of sweet peas, a bed of foxgloves gone to seed, and the peony, which had come from her mother's cutting and had never once flowered in the right month.

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The Harvest Show was a fortnight off. Mrs Pryce from the chapel had already entered her dahlias, and she had a way of standing too close to other people's tables while she judged them. Ada had painted the peony instead. She had sat at the kitchen table with a sable brush and a tin of gouache, mixing coral from vermilion and a little rose madder, and she had made the petals look so wet that Mr Hollis at the bank asked to buy the sheet. She refused him. The painting was not for sale, and neither was the bloom.

On the Thursday before the show, the bud at the foot of the stem split in the night. It was not the peony at all but a wild rose she had forgotten she planted, a stray thing from the hedge that had crept under the back wall. It was violet at the edge and cream at the heart, and it smelt of the rain. She stood over it in her slippers for a long time, the spoon still in her hand, and understood that the frost had never been the danger.

She cut the peony on Friday, carried it to the hall in a jam jar, and left the painting on the trestle beside it with her name written small on the back. Mrs Pryce's dahlias took the cup. Ada walked home by the canal, pressing a petal of the wild rose between the pages of her mother's hymnbook, and found she did not mind at all.