Pencil sketch of a botanical floral tattoo design with peonies, lilies and chrysanthemums, shaded in pale green on tracing paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical flower sketch with peonies and lilies

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A pencil drawing of a cluster of flowers, including large peony-like blooms, a lily, a chrysanthemum and a sprig of lily of the valley, with leaves and stems running through the arrangement. The outlines are drawn in dark graphite with soft green pencil shading inside the petals and leaves. The design is arranged diagonally on a sheet of pale tracing paper, with the bloom cluster at the top and smaller flowers trailing down the lower right.

Botanical Flower Peony Lily Chrysanthemum Leaves Stem

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 lift was out again, so I carried the roll of tracing paper up fourteen flights with my arm hooked round it like a newspaper. Dev had sent me up with it from the print shop on Harrow Road, because he said I was the only one in the building who wouldn't bend a peony. Inside the flat the window was open, and the smell of the car park came in with the traffic.

Keep reading

Marjorie next door had been growing lilies in old paint tins on her balcony since April, and she had promised me a bunch for the drawing. Dev wanted the sheet finished by Friday. He'd laid down the outline himself in graphite, bold and quick, then handed the green pencil to me because my hand was steadier with colour. I shaded the petals pale, went lighter at the edges, and left the paper bare where the light would catch. The chrysanthemum at the bottom took longest, all those tight curled layers, and the lily of the valley I did last, little bells dropping down the right-hand side as if they were falling off the page.

On Thursday Marjorie knocked with a bunch in a jam jar, cut too short, the bells already going yellow at the tips. She looked at the sheet on my table for a long time, then tapped one leaf with her finger. "That's the colour they were when Sol brought them home," she said. "Before he went into the hospital." I hadn't known Sol was her husband. I had never asked.

I didn't say anything clever. I set the jam jar on the sill beside the drawing, so the real flowers and their pencilled twins sat together in the grey light, and we let the kettle take its time.