Three-panel photo of a botanical shoulder tattoo with red peony-style flowers, a grey flower, green leaves and red rosehips on a person wearing a dark top.

Red peony and rosehip shoulder tattoo

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

Three photographs show a shoulder piece of large red peony-style flowers with pale centres, a muted grey five-petalled bloom, green leaves and clusters of red rosehips. The linework is defined and the petals are shaded with soft gradients of red and pink, with lighter highlights on the leaves. The arrangement wraps over the top and front of the shoulder, with the grey flower sitting to one side and the tattoo cropped at the edges of each frame.

Botanical Neo-trad Shoulder Peony Flower Rose Berry Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rosehips were ripe a full month early that year, and the steward's wife at Harrowcleft took it as a warning. She sent her youngest, Maud, up the hill path with a basket and a sharp knife, and told her not to stop for anyone who called her by name from the ruin.

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The castle had been burned in her grandfather's time. Nothing lived inside its walls but a crooked peony bush that had seeded itself in the chapel, its flowers as wide as a palm and red as a cut lip. Maud cut hips from the briars below the gatehouse and filled the basket. A grey-petalled mallow leaned out from a crack in the stones, and it bowed to her each time the wind moved it, which she decided not to mention at home.

Someone did call her name. It was the lord's own voice, thin as thread, from somewhere under the chapel floor, asking her to lift the flagstone so he could see the sun. She knelt by the peony roots and listened. Her mother had told her that the dead want only to be remembered in the right order, so she said the names of every household that had burned, and the flowers opened one by one until the chapel was full of colour.

When she came down at dusk the basket was heavy with berries and her fingers were stained red to the knuckle. Her mother took one look and asked nothing. Next morning the flagstone lay flat in the grass, and the peony had climbed over the wall toward the valley road, as if it had somewhere to be.