Full-colour Japanese-style peony tattoo with blue, purple, red and pink blooms and green leaves running down the back.

Colourful peony vine across a back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A vine of peony blossoms and buds runs diagonally down the back, from the shoulder blade towards the lower back. The blooms are blue, purple, red and pink, with soft shading, layered petals and green leaves outlined in dark lines. The composition is well balanced, and the flowers sit on bare skin with a slight natural texture.

Botanical Japanese Back Peony Flower Bud Leaf Vine

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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

Sit down a minute, Priya, the kettle can wait. You look like you've been carrying the whole third floor on your back. I'll tell you about the peonies, that'll keep your eyes open till the lights come up.

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Mrs Hollis had a yard behind the almshouses on Church Street, and in it a wall the length of a bus, and up that wall she trained a peony vine. Every spring the rector came round to admire it and told her peonies only came pink or white, that anything else was a fib from the seed merchant. So she bought a packet of blue, a packet of purple, and a red one that cost her a week's coal money, and she spent three summers coaxing them onto the one stem. Half of them died. The blue ones were stubborn. She said blue was the only honest colour a flower could be, because nobody ever argued with the sky.

She died in April, the year the blue finally came through. I was on nights then, pushing the linen trolleys up from the basement, and her grandson asked me to fetch the last bud off the wall before the frost took it. I cut it with my pocket knife, wrapped it in a damp tea towel, and carried it up Ward Four like a man bringing news. The sister on duty found a jam jar. We stood it on the locker, and at six in the morning, when the windows went grey, that blue bloom opened one petal at a time, slow as a clock nobody was watching.

Mrs Hollis never saw it. Mind, the best things tend to open once the gardener has gone for her tea. Right, that's my round finished. Off you go, Priya, your patient in bay two is stirring.