Black and grey peony tattoo in dotwork and linework shading covering the inner forearm.

Black and grey peony on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large peony bloom with layered, curled petals is tattooed on the forearm, with a dark leaf below it. The petals are built from fine stippled dots and directional lines, with solid black areas in the centre and leaves that give contrast. The image is shown in greyscale and the composition fills the frame, with the arm resting on white paper towel.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Peony Flower Petal Leaves

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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

Mrs Tennant would only let you lodge at Gull Rock House on the condition that the peony in her back garden was left alone. Her husband had planted it the summer before he went off the breakwater, a white one from a nursery in Kent, and in eleven years it had never once opened. Every July she stood at the scullery window and told the kettle it was sulking.

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You drew it anyway, from the attic window at first, because the light off the Channel came in sideways and made the wall of the bed look like a stack of paper. Stippling is slow work: a fine nib, a dot here, a dot there, until the page darkens the way dusk does, from the edges inward. You built the petals curl upon curl and left the leaves solid black, because the ink had nowhere else to go. By the ninth day the bud had split at its seam, and the petals inside were folded tight as unread letters, and they were not white.

Mrs Tennant came up the stairs with a tray and stood in the doorway longer than was polite. "That's not the one he planted," she said. "That one's grown from the bed by the wall, where we buried Tom's dog." She set the tray down without looking at it. You had drawn the bloom turned away from the window, and the shadows you had given it ran the same way the tide had gone that morning.

She did not ask you to leave. She asked whether you would draw it once more, the right way round, so that she could see its face from the kitchen.