Back of an upper arm with a vivid pink and red rose and peony tattoo on a green stem, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink rose and peony on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman with flowers in her hair shows a tattoo of pink and red roses, peony blooms, buds and green leaves climbing a thin stem down the back of her upper arm. The petals are shaded with soft gradients and fine detail, giving a painted, watercolour-like look in mostly colour ink. The arm fills the right side of a bright, pale background, with the design placed near the centre of the frame.

Botanical Upper arm Rose Peony Flower Bud Leaf Stem Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Night shift, Ward 7, 3.40 a.m. The corridor lights are dimmed to the amber they use after midnight, and the only sound is the drip stand in bay C ticking like a clock somebody forgot to wind. I am writing this on the back of a drug chart because my notebook is in my locker and I do not want to walk down there.

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Mrs Pryce in bed four asked for flowers at half eleven. Not the carnations from the shop, she said, the proper sort, the ones that go on a stem like a rope and smell of rain. Her husband grew peonies in Harrow for forty years and she has not seen one since March. I told her the ward has a rule about outside things. She told me she had been breaking the rules of this hospital since 1961, which I believe.

So at ten to four I went out through the side doors to the rose bed by the bins, where the council plants something pink every summer and nobody prunes it. In the dark the blooms looked as if they had been painted with a wet brush, deep red at the heart and paler at the rim, the leaves glossy under the lamp. I took three stems and a bud on a thin reddish stalk, and Dev, the porter, held the door open and pretended not to see.

Back in bay C I put them in a jam jar with water from the sluice. Mrs Pryce held the bud between two fingers and turned it toward the light like a jeweller checking a stone. She didn't say anything. By five the bud had loosened, and by six it had opened, one pink fold after another, and the woman in the next bed sat up to look. I am going home now. The jar stays on the table with the blind half up, and the sky over the car park is turning the colour of the petals.