Soft pink peony tattoo with green leaves across the upper back, shaded in a painterly style.

Pink peony on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A large peony in pink and magenta tones covers most of the upper back, with its petals layered and softly shaded to suggest depth. Several green leaves sit beneath the bloom, and the outlines are thin and reddish rather than solid black. The subject is framed from behind against a plain skin tone and a black top, with the head cropped out of view.

Botanical Back Peony Flower Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had been coming down since Tuesday, and by Friday the lane to Hollin Fold was gone under it, so the four of us were stuck at the Blackwater Inn with nothing to do but eat Mrs Abbott's mutton and argue about the fire. The only thing in the back parlour worth looking at was the folding screen my mother had bought at a Leeds sale the year before she died, six panels of pale silk with a single peony painted across them, its bloom spilling over two panels and the green leaves tumbling down into the third.

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Mr Reddish, a cloth merchant who had been stranded with us since the Tuesday, said the painter must have been in a hurry, because the petals were all edges and no centre. I told him the centre was in the light, not the paint. He laughed and said that was the sort of thing a publican's daughter would say. I did not mind him. He was the only one who asked me about the screen rather than the price of the rooms.

On the seventh night the power went and we sat by candles. I took the lamp to the screen and traced with my thumb where the pinks ran into mauve at the outer petals, and where the leaves had been laid on so thin they looked like breath on glass. My mother had sketched the first bloom on the back of a wedding invitation and never finished the second. Nobody in the family knew where the rest of it had come from.

When the plough finally came up the lane on Monday, Mr Reddish left a card on the bar with a cheque for the screen, twice what we had paid. I wrapped it in brown paper and kept it in the back room. Some things are for the wall, my father said, and some are for the family. I have never asked him which this one was.