Neo-traditional floral tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder, with grey-shaded blossoms at the top and a red rose and green leaves below.

Floral sleeve of peonies and rosebuds on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Two side-by-side photographs show a floral sleeve covering the upper arm and shoulder, with large open blossoms, rosebuds and layered green leaves. The upper flowers are rendered in soft grey shading with fine black outlines, while the lower bloom is filled with warm red and pink tones. The composition runs diagonally down the arm, with the lower rose as the strongest focal point.

Neo-trad Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Peony Rose Rosebud Flower Leaves Bud Floral

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 pass closed at four, the way it always did in January, and by dusk the snow had reached the sills of the Hollin Fell inn. Mrs Orrell kept the kitchen door propped so the range could breathe, and two drovers from Kirkby sat by the fire arguing over whether a peony was just a rose that had given up. You kept out of it. You were on your knees at the cellar hatch, chipping ice off the latch with a bread knife, when the bell over the front door gave one dull knock.

Keep reading

The stranger stamped slush from his boots and asked for a room, then asked, more quietly, whether the old screen was still in the snug. It was six panels of painted paper, grey wash laid over ink, blossoms drifting across it like weather. Nobody had looked at it properly in years. Mrs Orrell said the last tenant had painted it through a bad winter and left before the thaw. You remembered the shape of the wash but not the colour, and you could not have said why it mattered to him that you should go in with him and see.

He stood before the screen with his hands behind his back and took a long time over it. Then he pointed, low down on the last panel, to a single bloom you had walked past a hundred times: one open peony, dense and red as a coal, the only colour in the room. He said she had kept that one back for whoever came in out of the cold.

You fetched the lamp from the hook. When you lifted it, the red bloom caught the light first, and the grey ones came up slowly around it, as if the snow outside had only just let them go.