Botanical flash design of a purple peony above a red peony, with grey-brown leaves and a green stem, shown on a white background with no body placement.

Two peonies with grey leaves

Botanical · Colour · Flash

The design shows two large peonies stacked vertically, a magenta-purple bloom at the top and a red-orange bloom below, each with a yellow stamen centre. Grey-brown leaves and a dark green stem frame the flowers and extend down to the base of the sheet. The petals are shaded with soft gradients and fine outlines, and the image sits on a plain white background with a product code printed at the bottom.

Botanical Peony Flower Leaves Stem Stamen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The roots came aboard at Fuzhou in a basket of wet sacking, two knotted lumps the colour of old tea. Chen Wei, the cook, carried them to the stern himself, because the old captain had said nothing on his ship should die before the fishing grounds. He planted them in a tub of river mud lashed to the rail, and every morning he poured the rinse water from the rice pot over them.

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For forty days the tub gave nothing but grey-green leaves, tough as leather, that the wind tore at. The sailors laughed at him. Then in the fifth week, with the coast a smudge behind them and the sea gone the colour of pewter, one root put up a bud as red as a coal in a stove. The next morning a second bud opened, deep plum, and the men came to look. Nobody spoke. Even the mate, who swore at gulls, took off his cap.

In the sixth week a storm came down from the north. The captain ordered the tub thrown over the side, and Chen Wei refused. He lashed himself beside it with a length of rope and held on while the deck went under. By dawn the flowers were beaten flat, their petals torn, but still standing upright in the mud.

They reached Tamsui with the bloom half gone. Chen Wei took the plum one up the hill to his daughter's house and gave the red one to the harbour master's widow, telling each of them that the sea had been kind, which was nearly true. Years later the widow's gate still had a red peony beside it, and sailors passing in the wet season would stop and count its petals, as if a flower that had crossed open water had earned the right to be counted.