Black and grey botanical flash design of two peonies with dark shaded leaves and a stem, with small yellow stamens at the centre of each bloom.

Black and grey peony flower design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows two large peony blooms stacked vertically, one above the other, with layered petals, dark brown-grey leaves and a long stem running along the bottom. The petals are rendered with soft grey washes and fine outlines, giving a painterly, layered look. Small yellow stamens add the only colour, and a faint speckled texture runs across the paper.

Botanical Peony Flower Leaves Stem Petal

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 bread was already proving when Chen Yao came down the companionway with a rolled paper under his arm and galley twine round its middle. He had been told twice that the bread room was no place for paintings, but he only shrugged and said the forecastle was damper than my ovens. He unrolled it across the scrubbed table between the flour sacks and the lard tin, then pinned the corners with two onions and my second-best cleaver. Two great blooms stood one above the other, grey as river stones, their petals lapping like wet linen, and at the heart of each a crown of pale yellow threads.

Keep reading

The fan painter in Hong Kong had sold it to him, he said, with a promise attached. A peony was for spring and for the rich, and a sailor who carried one into open water would always find a fair wind home. I told him the only wind I trusted was the one that brought fresh bread up the hatch on time, and that a cook counts sacks, not blessings. But I stood there longer than I needed to, looking at those stamens. They were the exact yellow of the one egg we had kept back since Aden, and I had been saving it for a cake nobody aboard had yet earned.

Off the Cape the sea came over the bow in a green wall and the galley door burst open. Everything that could slide went: a dozen tins, the spice rack, the tally board with its chalk marks for biscuits and salt pork. When the mess was cleared I found the painting soaked through, the upper flower bruised at one edge and the lower one bleeding grey into the paper. Chen Yao swore he would take it to the bosun for mending. I pinned it above the tally board instead, where the chalk had run out of room.

We docked at Gravesend with eleven biscuits left and the egg still whole in its bowl. Chen Yao took the painting home to his mother's wall in Limehouse, and I went back to counting sacks, though every morning my eye went up to the stems and the yellow threads and the place where the damp had blurred them into light.