Black and grey botanical sleeve with peonies, roses and small flowers covering a woman's shoulder, upper arm and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey floral sleeve on an arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A full arm sleeve of flowers including large peonies, roses, smaller five-petalled blooms and leaves, with the design wrapping from the shoulder down toward the forearm. The linework is fine and the petals are built up with soft grey shading and dark accents, giving depth and contrast. The image is in black and grey and is cropped below the chin, so only the torso and arm are shown against a dark background.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Peony Rose Flower Leaves Sleeve

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peonies kept sagging. Each morning before five I piped them onto the sponge in buttercream, and each morning they had slumped into soft puddles by the time the shutter went up. Dad would have laughed at me. He had a rule about flowers: build the back petals first, press the shadow in with the flat of the nozzle, and never trust a bloom that looks finished too quickly.

Keep reading

The order came in on a Tuesday, scrawled on the back of a receipt. Two tiers, flowers all over, no colour. Grey, the note said, underlined twice, as if the word might be misread. Mrs Hale collected it herself the next afternoon. She was seventy-odd and bought her bread from us every Thursday, and she stood by the cabinet turning her wedding ring while I explained that grey buttercream was only butter with a spoon of cocoa and a drop of black gel, which I did not tell her was a poor substitute for what she had in mind.

She wanted the peonies darker at the heart, she said, the way her husband had drawn them on the back of every birthday card for fifty years. I had not known he drew. So that night I shaded them with cocoa and a brush dry as bone, petal by petal, while the oven breathed behind me and the sky over the car park went from ink to pewter.

At six the window turned the colour of the cake. I set the top tier in the cold case and saw, for the first time, that the flowers had held. Mrs Hale came at nine. She touched one peony with a fingertip, then lifted her hand away quickly, as though it might still be wet, and said it looked just like him.