Neo-traditional tattoo of a pink and purple peony with teal centres and green leaves on the forearm, with a woman's head above it.

Pink and purple peony on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large peony in pink and purple, with a purple bud and green leaves, fills the forearm, with a stylised female portrait tattoo visible above it. The bold black outlines and saturated fills give a neo-traditional look, with soft shading in the petals and teal tones at the flower centres. The photo shows two angles of the same arm side by side on a dark background.

Neo-trad Botanical Forearm Peony Flower Bud Leaf Woman Portrait Headscarf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peonies had outlived the castle's roof by two hundred years, which Maud's grandmother said was the only sensible thing the Ferrers family had ever done. They grew along the south wall of the inner ward, where the stone still held a little sun, pink heads heavy enough to bend the stems flat against the moss. Maud came up the bank every morning in June with her secateurs and a bucket, and every morning she counted the buds the way other people counted pennies.

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The purple one was the difficult one. It sat low by the broken gate, tight and dark as a plum, and it had not opened in three summers. Old Tom from the village had helped plant the first bulbs with the countess's gardener in 1961, and he had never been able to say what colour the flower would turn out. He could not climb the bank now. His hip had gone the winter before, and the doctor in Alnwick had told him to avoid anywhere with steps.

On the fourth of June the bud split. Maud knelt on the wet flagstones to look at it. Inside, the petals were a bruised pink fading into a violet that had no name in the seed catalogue, and round the centre ran a ring of teal, the same green as the sea beneath the headland. She cut it with the good secateurs, wrapped the stem in a damp handkerchief and carried it down the bank in both hands, stepping where the path had fallen away.

Tom was sitting on his step with the door open. He took the flower without a word and held it up to the light for a long time. Then he laughed, short and surprised, and said, "She always said it would come when someone else was minding it." Maud looked back up at the wall, where the other peonies had already dropped a few petals onto the grass, and she left the bucket where it stood.