Dotwork and linework floral sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder, with red blossoms at the top and black flowers below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral sleeve on an upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A full floral sleeve covers the upper arm and reaches toward the shoulder, with large flower heads, leaves and red blossoms at the top. The linework is black and the petals and leaves are filled with stippled dotwork shading. Red ink appears only in the upper blooms, while the rest of the design is in black and grey against a plain, softly lit background.

Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Flower Peony Leaves Blossom 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 mill-wife at Coldharbour had no patience for flowers that did not earn their keep, so when a peony came up black-stemmed through the flagstones of her walled garden, she meant to pull it. She went out with the hoe at first light and found it already open, a bloom as wide as a cartwheel, its petals not red and not white but grey as the underside of rain, every one of them speckled with tiny dark dots like a sky before snow.

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Her daughter Nell came down the path and laughed. 'It is only a flower, Mam. Leave it be.' But the old woman had heard the same from the parson and the tax man, and she knew how a harmless-looking thing could take a field. She knelt and counted the dots on one petal, then the next, lost her place at forty, and started again.

Three nights she sat up with it, a pin in one hand and the candle in the other. Each dot she pricked drew the bloom a little nearer the wall, until its leaves crept over the sill and onto the cold stone of the house. On the third night she understood what it asked. Every speck was a night someone had waited up for, and the garden would not let go until every waiting was counted. So she pricked one for her husband, one for the boy drowned at the weir, and last of all, in the top of the bush where the red blossoms opened, one for herself. The flower settled into the wall like a sleeper turning over.