Black ink flash drawing of a wasp above peony and lily blooms, overlaid with a dotted geometric wireframe, shown as a tattoo design.

Wasp and peonies within a geometric frame

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed wasp, seen from above, sits centrally over a cluster of peonies, lilies and a chrysanthemum-like bloom. Fine ink linework and stippled shading define the insect's striped abdomen, wings and legs, while the flowers use hatching for depth. A thin geometric wireframe of intersecting lines and dashed edges sits behind the subject, and the drawing is on plain white paper with no body part shown.

Botanical Geometric Insect Flower Peony Lily Chrysanthemum Geometric shape Linework

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wasp came in on the Tuesday, the same week the peonies opened, and it went straight for the frame Walter built the summer before he died. He had run the lattice from the glasshouse roof down to the bed, crossing the wire at angles he'd worked out on the back of a seed packet, because he said a peony wants something to lean on, and a sensible shape to lean against. I told him the flowers didn't care about geometry. He said the flowers didn't care about much, which was why they needed a good frame.

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The wasp didn't care either. It walked along the dashed edges as if they were a road it had paid for, feelers working, and then settled on the big double pink head where the petals had begun to split. I stood at the door with the watering can meaning to fetch the net from the shed, and found I couldn't move. It was striped the way a good fisherman's jersey is striped, yellow and black and very deliberate, and it cleaned its forelegs slowly, one after the other, like someone with all afternoon to spare.

I should have shooed it out. Instead I sat on the upturned bucket and watched it for the better part of an hour while the lily by the potting bench shed its pollen down the front of my cardigan. Walter would have drawn it. He drew everything in that fine black ink and built up the shadows with a patience I never had, and he was always cross when I called his drawings fussy.

When the sun dropped behind the potting shed, the wasp lifted off the peony, circled the lattice twice as if checking every line, and went out through the gap under the vent. I left the vent propped open with a brick. The wire was still there in the dusk, sharp against the glass, holding up the peonies, which had never once asked it to.