Black outline tattoo of peonies, a chrysanthemum and leaves covering a forearm, in a Japanese-inspired botanical style.

Peony and chrysanthemum forearm design

Japanese · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the outer forearm with large peony and chrysanthemum blooms, leaves and buds drawn in bold black outline. The linework is clean and uninterrupted, with little or no shading, so the flowers are defined by their contours and a few interior details. The design wraps from the wrist up towards the elbow, and the arm is shown against a plain pale wall with light blue denim jeans and a white top visible.

Japanese Botanical Forearm Peony Chrysanthemum Flower Leaf Bud

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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

Pull your chairs in, all of you, before the lift starts its moaning. Right. Brackwell House, fourteenth floor, the winter the boiler died. There was a widow called Hettie Marsh who kept a peony in a paint tin on her balcony, because her husband had brought it home from the market the week before he went into hospital, and she was not going to let it die on her watch.

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The peony sulked. The wind came up off the car park and tore at its leaves, and the buds stayed shut out of pure spite. So Hettie did what she always did when a thing refused to flower. She went down fourteen floors, knocked on Mr Adeyemi's door on the ground, and asked him for the chrysanthemums he grew in the strip of earth behind the bin store, pale yellow ones, stubborn as goats. He gave her three and a lecture on drainage, and she climbed back up with the stems wrapped in a bus timetable.

By June the paint tin was crowded with blooms that had no business sharing a pot. Hettie could not paint them, so she drew them the only way she knew, in biro on the back of her rent book, with heavy outlines so the petals wouldn't run in the rain. When she died the book went to the caretaker, who pinned the page beside the lift doors. Every child who waited there for a ride traced the petals with one finger, and the outlines went smooth and dark from all that touching, the way a step wears down under feet.