Black and grey realistic peonies and leaves tattooed on a forearm, with the word love in script near the wrist.

Black and grey peony sleeve on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of several peony or rose-like flowers with leaves and stems climbs the outer forearm, with the word love in cursive script below the blooms. The flowers are shaded in soft greys with fine linework on the petals and leaves, giving them a realistic, dimensional look. The arm is held out towards the camera against a wooden floor, with a standing figure in a grey top, patterned shorts and white trainers behind it.

Botanical Realism Lettering Forearm Peony Flower Rose Leaves Stem Love Script Sleeve

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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

The peonies came over on the supply boat in February, twelve bare roots wrapped in wet sacking, and my father swore at them the whole way up the cliff path. He said nothing grew on Scarrow Head but gulls and grievances. I was nine and thought he was exaggerating.

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My mother planted them in the lee of the boundary wall, where the salt couldn't reach. By June the buds were the size of walnuts, and by midsummer they opened slowly, one petal at a time, like a letter being unfolded in no hurry at all. She cut them for the kitchen table and the lamp room. The cottage smelt of them until the fog came in and turned every bloom the colour of pewter.

The November my father's eyes began to fail, she took over the night watches and I learned the lamp's rhythm from the bottom of the tower stairs, counting the flashes through the glass. She left a jar of cut flowers on the gallery ledge so he would have something to look at between sweeps of the beam, and he told her it was the only thing on that rock worth the climb.

He died the following spring, while the first bud was still tight and pale against the wall. I cut it the morning after the funeral and carried it up all hundred and nine steps, and set it on the ledge beside the brass plate, where the light would pass over it every ninety seconds, gold and grey and gold again.