Black and grey linework tattoo of a rose, peony and poppy with leaves, sitting on the forearm.

Rose, peony and poppy on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A botanical design of a rose, a peony and a poppy with leaves, stacked diagonally up the forearm. The bold black outlines are filled with fine hatched shading and small stippled dots in the centres, with light grey tones in the petals. The design is in black and grey only and fills the length of the arm, with the poppy at the top and the peony at the bottom.

Botanical Traditional Forearm Rose Peony Poppy Flower Leaves Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came sideways down Shackle Street by eight, pooling in the dips of the tarpaulins until the whole market smelled of wet cardboard and cut stems. I had the flower stall at the bottom end, where the gutter runs straight past the fish, and I was losing a battle with a bucket of peonies that had opened too early for the weather.

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Dora Vance came under my awning with her collar up and asked for a rose, a peony and a poppy, all in one bunch, as though she were ordering a sandwich. I told her no florist in Leeds would put those three together. She said she knew that, which was why she had come to me. Her father had grown them in a patch behind the allotments, and the patch had gone to couch grass the spring he died.

I cut them anyway. The rose was tight and the colour of old brass, the peony heavy-headed, the poppy so thin it seemed to be thinking about leaving. I laid them along the wet cloth in the order they would stack: the poppy high, the rose in the middle, the peony low where the weight would sit. She watched my hands and said the arrangement looked like a climb. I said it was only a bunch of flowers. She shook her head and paid in coins, counting them out one at a time against the rain.

Three weeks later she came back past the stall and lifted her wrist, as if to say the bunch had lasted, and I understood she had carried it somewhere I could not see. The rain stopped that afternoon. I threw the leftover stems into the bin with the others, though I kept one loose poppy petal in my apron pocket for weeks afterwards, pressed flat by my thumb.