Colour tattoo of a pink peony with green leaves and a yellow centre on a shoulder, in a Japanese-influenced style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink peony on a shoulder

Japanese · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A large pink peony with ruffled petals and a yellow stamen centre fills the shoulder, with a second bloom partly visible behind it. Dark outlines define the petals and shading in deeper pink and lighter highlights gives the flowers volume. Green leaves with black outlines frame the lower and right side of the design against the skin.

Japanese Shoulder Peony Flower Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain ran off the awning in ropes all Thursday, and the peony seller at the bottom of Cutler's Row kept her buckets in the lee of the fishmonger's cart so the petals would not spot. Nobody came for peonies in weather like that. They came for bread and nails and boots, and they hurried past with their collars up, looking at the cobbles.

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A boy in a too-large coat stopped on the third day and asked what the big pink flower was called. She told him it was a peony, that it could take a whole summer to open and no longer than a morning to fall, and that the old people kept one by the door to keep bad luck off the step. He had no money. He had a dented tin whistle and a chipped plate, and he offered both. She shook her head and cut the largest bloom anyway, wrapping its stem in brown paper.

The rain kept on. A week later the boy came back with a second boy, and the two of them stood under the awning arguing about which of them had really been given the flower. She let them argue. The first bloom had gone soft at the edges and she had nearly tipped it in the gutter, but a woman from the mill had bought a bundle of leaves for her hat, and the seller's own mother had once told her that a flower cut for a stranger always finds its way back to the hand that cut it.

The next Thursday she found, tucked under her upturned pail, the dented tin whistle and the chipped plate. Beside them stood a jam jar holding a single green shoot, its roots still dripping. She set it in the window above the stall, and when the rain finally stopped the whole row smelled of pink.