Line drawing in teal and pale blue of a woman with long braided hair, a hand raised near peony flowers, shaded with dotwork, on a pale pink background.

Woman with braided hair and peonies

Dotwork · Colour · Flash

A woman with eyes closed and long, flowing braided hair rests her head to one side, with a raised hand and forearm drawn at the lower right. Peony blooms, buds and leaves surround the figure and weave through the hair. Fine ink linework and stippled dotwork shading are rendered in teal and pale blue against a soft pink background.

Dotwork Botanical Woman Braid Long hair Peony Flower Leaves Bud Hand Arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind up here likes to listen in. You want to know why the peony women cut their hair before the snow? Listen. In the high village of Corrow, above the pass where the carts turned back, there lived a rope-maker's daughter called Idrenne who had hair so long she sat on it. Her mother braided it each morning, three strands thick, and said a braid holds a house together the way a good knot holds a boat.

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The winter the pass closed, the mule drivers stopped coming and the village ran short of thread. Idrenne sat by the hearth with her eyes shut, humming the old tune her grandmother taught her, and the peonies that grew wild against the north wall of the church opened in the frost, which no peony had ever done. The priest said it was a sign. The baker said it was a nuisance.

Idrenne cut one braid and carried it down the pass to the broken bridge at Sallow Gap, where the river had taken three carts and a man named Tobias Renn. She laid the braid across the gap like a rope and walked it, arms out, eyes closed, because she had been told that if you looked at the water you would fall. Behind her the peonies bloomed along the path, pale pink, one for every step.

When the thaw came, the men found the bridge standing, woven and tight, and nobody could say whose hands had mended it. The braid was gone. Only a single peony bud sat at the rail, closed tight, and the village keeps it in a jar on the mantel still. Some say it opens on the night someone crosses safely. Mind your step on the way down, lad. The rope will hold, but only if you trust it.