Neo-traditional tattoo of pink peony flowers and green leaves across the top of a shoulder and upper arm.

Pink peonies and leaves on a shoulder

Neo-trad · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows several large pink peony blooms with layered petals, with a smaller bloom behind them towards the back of the shoulder, and green leaves with dark outlines spreading down the upper arm. The linework is bold and black, with soft shading within the petals and leaves, and small stamens are picked out in pale dots at the centre of the front flower. The pink and green tones dominate the image, which is shot at a slight angle with a shallow focus on the flowers.

Neo-trad Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Peony Flower Rose Leaves Petal Stamen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now, you will want to know why the old gardener sat up all night with a bellows and a paper lantern. Listen, because the village always gets this part wrong. Three peony bushes stood by the Magistrate's east wall, and the frost came early that spring, the way it comes when the gods are sulking. Kaiyuan, who had tended those bushes since he was a boy, went out at dusk with his lamp and breathed warm air onto each swollen bud, one after another, until the sky turned grey and his lips were numb.

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By morning the frost had taken the first bloom and then the second, and he knelt in the wet with soot on his fingers and wept like a child. His youngest, Mei-lan, came out barefoot in her sleeping robe and asked him why he cried over flowers that would only return next spring. He told her that a peony cannot be kept, only visited. She thought about this for a long while, then fetched her brushes.

She painted the last three blooms on rice paper that spring, the pink laid so thin you could see the wall through the petals, the leaves in heavy green with black lines pressed as hard as a brush tip would press. She dotted the centres with pale stamens, one grain at a time. When the Magistrate's clerk came to buy a scroll for the autumn festival, he took one look and carried it back to the city under his arm like a stolen child.

The real bushes died that winter, as Kaiyuan had always known they would. But every spring since, when the paper blooms are unrolled in the Magistrate's hall, the old gardener walks in and stands before them with his lamp unlit. He does not need the light any more. He stands there a while, breathing on his cold hands, the way a man warms them at a friend's door.