Colour tattoo of red peony flowers with green leaves on the outer forearm, shown on a person in a grey top and dark jeans.

Red peonies on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows several large red peony-style flowers, with layered petals and a few olive-green leaves on thin stems that run up the outer forearm. The linework is bold and dark, with soft red shading inside the petals and muted green shading on the leaves. The arm is photographed at an angle against a dark, blurred background, so the design fills most of the frame.

Botanical Neo-trad Forearm Peony Flower Leaves Botanical Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You'll want the kettle on for this one, because the peonies came from Mrs Abernethy's back garden in Whitby, and she never once let anybody pick them. Every June she stood at the gate with her secateurs like a sergeant, and the whole street knew not to ask. Then the summer her husband went out on the Ellen Mary and didn't come back, she cut every bloom on the lot and carried them down to the harbour wall in a tin bath. Nobody thought she'd lost her mind. They thought she was grieving. She was rather more practical than that.

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She laid the bath on the wall and let the wind take the petals one at a time, and she told the gulls where to fly. That's what the old fishwives swore, anyway. Forty years later my grandmother still said the sea came up red that evening, right to the third step of the slipway, and the lobster men wouldn't put out until they'd seen it fall back.

What I tell the lodgers is simple. Peonies don't mind the cold, they only mind being hurried. You can plant them and forget them for a decade, and then one morning there's a fist of red at the gate, bold as anything, looking as though it's always been there. Mrs Abernethy's bush is still by that gate, and it still comes up in June, and the leaves go the colour of old pennies every autumn.

So if you're walking the cliff path this week and you smell something sweet and heavy on the wind, don't go looking for a garden. Just lift your hat to the sea, and carry on up the hill.