Botanical tattoo of a dusty pink peony, a white anemone and green leaves wrapping over the shoulder and upper arm.

Peony and anemone floral piece on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large floral tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder, centred on a dusty pink peony with yellow stamens and a closed bud beside it. A white anemone with dark centre sits to the right, with small sprigs of blue-grey flowers, dark seed heads and layered green leaves filling the gaps. The linework is fine and dark with soft shading in the petals and leaves, and the muted palette of pinks, greens and greys is arranged in a curved composition that follows the shoulder.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Peony Anemone Flower Leaves Bud Seed head Wildflower Foliage Floral

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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

Mind the bucket by the door, love, there are anemone corms in it that have been waiting since February and they'll sulk if you knock them. Now, you want the story of the peony up Ada Pengelly's wall, and I'll tell it the way my mother told it to me, with the kettle going.

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Ada kept a walled garden above the harbour at Polmorrow, and every spring the fishermen would row past and shout up to ask whether the peony had opened yet. It hadn't. For three summers it sat there, a tight pink fist of a bud, while the lanes filled with lavender and the boats came and went. The village said it was the salt, or the north wind off the point, or Ada herself, who had been known to talk to plants in a voice she never used for people.

Then in the autumn a boy called Tobias Rowe came up from the quay with a paper twist of seeds from a ship out of Lisbon, and he would not say where he got them. Anemones, he said, grown from the wild red ones on the dunes, and white ones, which nobody on the coast had ever seen. Ada pressed them into the cold soil beside the peony without a word, and that winter the storms came in off the bay so hard the chimney pots went over the harbour wall.

In the spring the peony opened. It did not open all at once. It unfolded the way a sail fills, one petal and then another, and beside it the white anemone lifted its dark eye to the boats going out. Ada said nothing about it, but she sent Tobias up the hill every morning after that with a jug of tea, and he never once asked her what she had told the peony.