Woman seen from behind with a large pink and red peony tattoo on her upper back, with grey leaves, a rock and three small butterflies, in a Japanese-influenced botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony and butterfly back piece

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows pink and red peony blooms with grey leaves and a rocky branch, with three dark butterflies placed above the flowers. The linework is soft and the petals are shaded with gradients, giving a painterly, traditional East Asian feel. The tattoo fills the centre and upper right of the back, with the bare skin and a black thong framing the design.

Japanese Botanical Back Peony Flower Butterfly Leaves Rock Branch Back piece

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

Master Gu always said the peony was the last flower to forgive a careless brush, so I came to the screen with my wrists loose and my temper tight. The commission was from a merchant's widow in Suzhou who wanted her late husband's rooms filled with spring. Four panels of raw silk, and on the third the rock had to be right: grey, pitted, as old as the lane outside.

Keep reading

I borrowed that rock from the garden behind the teaching house, where it had stood beside the cracked basin for thirty years. Gu refused to sell me a sketch of it, so I drew it from memory and from a dozen nights watching lamplight fall across its ridges. I shaded the petals pale pink at the heart and deepened them to red where the light failed, washing each layer so thin the silk could drink it slowly.

The butterflies were the difficulty. Gu taught that a butterfly painted before its flower will fly off the silk by morning, so I left the three of them until the blooms were dry. On the last evening the rain came sideways off the canal, I had only a quarter of the dark ink left, and my hand shook from the cold.

I painted them in one breath each. When the widow's men carried the screen out at dawn, the grey light caught the paper and the butterflies seemed to lift from the stone toward the ceiling beams. Gu stood in the doorway for a long while and said only that the rock had been too stubborn to copy, which I took as praise.