Colourful traditional-style sleeve of peonies, roses and a unicorn on a woman's arm, with lettering on her fingers and a white t-shirt behind.

Traditional floral sleeve with peonies and roses

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A woman in a white t-shirt crosses her arms, showing a full sleeve of bold, colourful tattoos across her forearm and upper arm. The largest motif is a red and blue-grey peony with dark outlines, flanked by roses and yellow blossoms with green leaves. Her right forearm shows a unicorn and a rose, and her fingers carry small letters and a diamond.

Traditional Forearm Upper arm Hand Peony Rose Flower Unicorn Diamond Letter Leaves Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Mags Pennock kept the walled garden behind the mill at Harrowby, and every spring she told the children that the peony by the gate was older than the wall. Its heads were the colour of rust and then of blood, and its leaves were dark and ragged at the edges like a coat left out in the rain. Nobody was allowed to cut it. The roses could be trimmed, the beans pulled and the nettles burned, but the peony was left alone, because her mother had said so and her mother's mother before that.

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The trouble came in a dry summer when the miller's boy, Tobias Rede, wanted a bloom for the harvest fair. He was not a patient lad. He climbed the wall at dusk with a kitchen knife and a sack, and he cut the biggest head he could reach. Mags heard the stem snap from her bedroom window and did not go down. She knew what the garden would do, and she knew the boy would have to learn it for himself.

By morning he was not in the mill. He was standing among the roses with his feet sunk to the ankles in the bed, and the briars had crept up his shins and round his wrists, petal by petal, until his face was the colour of a peony's heart. The unicorn that lived in the old orchard wall came down to look at him, lowered its horn and asked whether he had learned to stand tall among things bigger than himself. He said he had. The unicorn breathed on the roses until they let him go.

Tobias walked home with scratched legs and a jar of well water he had not asked for. He never cut a flower again. Each spring after, Mags found one peony head left on the gatepost, its petals already dropping, with the wall's shadow lying across it like a hand.