Colour tattoo of a red peony with a bud and green leaves on the upper thigh, above black underwear with pink trim.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red peony with leaves on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large red peony bloom sits at the centre, with a closed bud at the upper left and a sprig of green leaves trailing down to the lower right. The petals use layered reds, pinks and white highlights, with soft grey shading behind the flower to give depth. The composition wraps around the curve of the hip and thigh, and the leaves are rendered in several shades of green.

Botanical Realism Thigh Peony Flower Bud Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peonies on Inchkeill were late that year, so you cut the stems before the buds had decided anything. Mrs Abernethy wanted red for the chapel windows by Saturday, and she had never once accepted a wait as an answer. Your hands were sticky with sap, and the smell of it stayed in your coat all the way down the causeway to the ferry.

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Tomas, who ran the boat, said peonies were bad luck on the water. You told him the ants crawling over the buds were worse, and he laughed and let you stow the crates under the bench beside the nets. The crossing was flat and grey. Somewhere off the point the sun broke through in one long bar, and it lit the cut heads so that every petal looked lacquered, the pinks going nearly white where the light fell across their edges.

At the mainland the florist's van was already waiting with its back doors propped open. Nobody asked about the leaves. You had kept a sprig of the dark green foliage back without thinking, and when you lifted the last crate onto the quay it was still there, tucked under your arm in the wet sacking, bruised and bright.

Years later the chapel was sold and the windows went with it, but you still keep a closed bud in a jar on the sill, the way someone keeps a stone from a beach they loved. Every June it opens a little more than you expect.