Colour tattoo of pink peonies with grey lace-style ornament and hanging beads across the outer thigh, in a botanical style.

Pink peonies and lace on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The design shows several pink peony flowers with dark centres, a small bud and pale yellow blossoms, set against grey ornamental lace patterns. Strings of beads and small drops hang down towards green and yellow leaves at the base of the design. Black outlines and soft shading give the flowers depth, and the composition runs diagonally down the outer thigh.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody buys a ticket to watch a wardrobe mistress, so I have always been the one behind the curtain with a mouthful of pins. The peony costume came to me in a tea chest in 1979, and by the time Lionel's Travelling Marvels reached the Kent coast that autumn, it had lost half its drops and most of its nerve. Two wagons were already sold for scrap. The ringmaster now sold raffle tickets from a card table beside the candyfloss, and the lions had been replaced by a goat called Duchess who would not stand on anything taller than a crate.

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I spent three nights unpicking the lace collar, bead by bead, and restringing it on black silk thread. The beads were glass, cut like tiny raindrops, and each one had to hang just so, otherwise the whole thing looked like a chandelier that had fallen the wrong way. Lionel came in with cocoa and asked why I bothered, when the next town would hold a crowd of six and a dog. I told him the flowers did not know that. Peonies open whether or not anyone is watching. They simply take their time about it.

On the last night we played a village hall outside Ramsgate. Duchess sulked, the band played two tunes, and I stood in the wings while Dorothy walked out under a single blue lamp. The collar caught the light. Every drop threw a small flicker across the canvas, and for the length of one slow turn the hall went quiet in the way it does when people have forgotten to be disappointed.

Afterwards Lionel folded the costume himself, which he had never once done, and tucked a pink silk bud into the breast pocket of my coat. Pinned to the paper inside was a note in his cramped capitals: FOR THE NEXT SHOW. There was no next show. I still have the note, the bud, and one loose bead that I never sewed back on.

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