Neo-traditional botanical tattoo of a large peony with green leaves and a butterfly, running up the inside of a forearm.

Peony and butterfly on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large peony bloom sits at the centre of the design, with its petals shaded in soft greys and blush pink and outlined in dark ink. Olive-green leaves with dark red edging and black leaves surround it, with a small butterfly with tan wings at the top of the arm. The design climbs the forearm diagonally against a plain black background, with clean outlines and solid colour fills.

Neo-trad Botanical Forearm Peony Flower Leaves Butterfly Foliage Berry

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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

Nobody on Thornbury Lane could get the old peony to open. Mrs Abney had tried lime and rainwater, then sang to it, which the neighbours agreed was the real trouble. By June the bush was all leaves and shut buds, dark green and stubborn as a locked gate.

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Then Tomas, who had come up from the coast with a handcart and no money, cut back the bramble strangling its roots. Under the soil he found a tin box, and inside it a letter gone soft as cloth. It said the bush had been planted for a bride who never came home from the sea, and that it would open only when someone set down a thing they had carried for a long time. Tomas thought this was nonsense. He laid his father's folding knife on the stone wall anyway, the one he had carried since he was twelve.

In the morning a butterfly sat on the knife handle, tan wings folded like an envelope. The buds along the lowest branch had split in the night, pink at the edges, and by evening the largest bloom hung over the wall, heavy as a bell. Mrs Abney stood at her gate and said nothing for a long time.

Tomas kept the knife. He never asked Mrs Abney what the bush had been waiting for, and it bloomed every June after, with the butterfly coming back to it, which was how the lane knew the arrangement still held.