Pencil flash design of a woman with peony flowers, a crescent moon on her brow and a hand holding a red heart, in a neo-traditional style.

Woman with peonies and crescent moon design

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A pencil drawing of a woman's face framed by large peony blooms and swirling hair, with a crescent moon motif on her brow. A shaded hand with long fingers cradles a small red heart, and the surrounding curls and flourishes are drawn in fine black linework. Pale green and blue pencil colour appears in the leaves and petals, with red on the lips and heart, while the rest of the drawing is grey shading on cream paper.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down, and mind the spilt lemonade, because I'll not tell this twice. You want the story of Marguerite Lowe and the dance hall above the chip shop in Scarborough? Then listen. The band was three old men and a piano with a dead key, and every Saturday Marguerite climbed those stairs with peonies pinned in her hair, great cream heads she bought by the bucketful off the market barrow. They shed all over the sprung floor, and the cleaner swore at her for it every week.

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She never danced with the lads who asked. She'd look at them the way you'd look at a bus timetable, then tap the little brass crescent on her brow and ask the drummer for the moon waltz. Nobody knew why she wanted that tune. The drummer said his father had played it the night the lighthouse lamp went out for good, and that Marguerite had sat on the harbour wall until dawn, singing the wrong words to it.

The winter the hall was to be pulled down, a lad called Tobias Pell came up the stairs with a glass heart in his palm, red as a cherry, and asked her to dance. She let him hold her hand. He pressed the heart into her fingers and she closed them slowly, the way you'd shut a purse on a bad debt, and the band stopped mid-bar because the drummer had seen her face go white. She put the heart back in his hand and laid her own over it.

"Go home, Tobias," she said, "before the moon comes round again." He went. The next Saturday the hall was dark, the petals were still on the floor, brown at the edges, and nobody swept them up.

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