Black and grey botanical tattoo of two peony flowers stacked down the upper thigh of a person seated on a bed.

Two peonies on an upper thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two large peony flowers are drawn one above the other, with layered petals, buds and a few leaves at the top. The linework is fine and dark, with soft grey shading inside the petals that gives them depth. The photograph is shallow in focus, with the tattooed leg in sharp view against a blurred cream bedding and a black fabric draped across the lower part of the frame.

Botanical Fine line Thigh Peony Flower Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peonies came up in the wrong order this year. The crimson doubles that Dad planted by the wash-house opened a full fortnight before the pale ones along the wall, which he always said was the way of things, the loud ones showing off first. I told Mrs Ashdown that over the fence and she only pursed her mouth and asked whether I had been feeding them the sugar water again.

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What I had been feeding them, in truth, was my own ink. Dad left a tin of Indian ink and a box of quill nibs in the potting shed when he went into the hospital at Lincoln, and I found them the week after the funeral. I started drawing the flowers because I could not bear to watch them drop. Every morning I sat on the upturned bucket with the sketchbook on my knee and tried to get the petals to lie the way they lay, one curled edge over another, the shadow pooling underneath where the light could not reach.

The drawings were terrible at first. The petals came out like cabbage leaves. But by the third week I could see the depth in them, the grey wash I had laid in with a wet brush so the cup of each bloom looked as if it held a little rain. I stopped being sorry for myself somewhere around then and started being curious instead, which Dad would have said was the more useful of the two.

On Saturday the post brought a parcel from Mrs Ashdown's nephew in Boston, a bundle of botanical prints from before the war. Tucked inside was a note in her wobbling hand: 'Your father's peonies, they are the best I have seen since the Duchess's garden.' I read it twice before I understood. He had been drawing them too, in the margins of his seed order book, and I had never once thought to look.