Black ink line drawing of a peony with blossoms, leaves and berry sprigs on white paper, a botanical tattoo design sketch.

Peony and blossom floral sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black pen line drawing of a large peony at the centre, surrounded by smaller five-petalled blossoms, pointed leaves, buds and clusters of berries on short stems. The outlines are even and unshaded, with fine interior lines marking the petal folds and leaf veins. The sheet is white with no colour, and the composition spreads diagonally from the upper left to the lower right.

Botanical Peony Flower Blossom Leaf Berry Bud Branch Sketch

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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 generator coughed twice before the lights came up over the dodgems, and you were already on your knees on the tarpaulin with a sheet of cartridge paper weighed down by a jam jar. Mr Doyle wanted a new panel for the gondola nearest the gate, something to replace the chipped rose that had hung there since his father's day. Rain had softened the field outside Boston, and the mud took your boots to the ankle whenever you stepped off the boards.

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You drew the peony first, as you always did, with the black Graphic pen that had cost more than your first week's wages. Its petals folded over one another like wet tissue. You set the small five-petalled blossoms around its base where the wind would not reach them, then a bud on a thin stalk, then the berries, which Doyle's daughter insisted were grapes until you told her they were not. The lines had to be even. A fairground panel forgives nothing once the gilt goes on.

By Thursday the sketch was finished and the fair was coming down around it. Ropes slapped the canvas, a man swore about a missing pin, and the ghost train's skeletons went into a van face down. You rolled the paper and tucked it inside your coat, meaning to paint it up on the Saturday in Skegness, but the van had a flat outside Spalding and the panel never got its colour.

Eleven years later you saw a gondola in a museum in Ely, the rose long gone and your peony in its place, pale and unpainted but plainly the thing you had drawn. A girl with a sticky lolly was tracing the outline with one finger, and nobody had told her it was unfinished.