Black and grey peony tattoos with leaves sit on both shoulders and upper chest of a woman with a dark bob haircut.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Twin peony tattoos on shoulders and chest

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Two large peony flowers with leaves and stems mirror each other across the shoulders and upper chest. The linework is dark and defined, with soft grey shading that gives the petals depth and volume. The composition is symmetrical, with the chin and face cropped out of frame and the plain textured wall behind.

Botanical Shoulder Chest Peony Flower Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Ashby kept two peony bushes in pots on the roof of the narrowboat Marigold, and every June she said they were the only honest things on the Thames. Her husband Walter thought this was a joke until the spring the flood came over the Iffley meadows and the lock-keeper's boy went into the cut.

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The water was brown and fast, pushing against the weir with a noise like a crowd. Young Tom Sallow had gone after a dog, and now he was somewhere under the willows, shouting in short bursts that got smaller each time. Men ran along the towpath with lamps. Nobody could get a boat close without being turned sideways and smashed. Nell stood on the Marigold's gunwale with a pair of secateurs in her apron pocket, which she later said was the only thing she could think to bring.

She cut two full blooms, pink and heavy as wet wool, and dropped one off the port bow and one off the starboard. Walter swore at her. But the old carters on that stretch had always said that a flower set on fast water goes the way the water wants, and that two set together will take a pair of ways and meet again. The petals spun apart, slid under the willow boughs, and swung round in the eddy by the sluice. Where they stopped, the boy's hand was lying flat on the surface, reaching for the shine.

They pulled him out before the weir. Nell kept the bushes. Every spring after, the two blooms on the roof opened on the same morning, one leaning left and one leaning right, as if the same careful hand had drawn them.