Black and grey peony and botanical tattoo covering the lower legs from the knee to the ankle, shown on both legs in a Japanese-influenced floral style.

Peony and flower leg sleeve on both legs

Japanese · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

Two legs are covered from just below the knee down to the ankle with large peony blooms, smaller flowers and leaves. The peonies combine bold outline work with soft grey shading, and the leaves and background foliage use dark solid fills for contrast. The image is shown straight on against a plain light background, so the full symmetrical design across both legs is clear.

Japanese Botanical Calf Ankle Peony Flower Leaf Leg sleeve

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

Sit down, sit down, and mind the dog. Aye, that's the stair you want, the one with the brass rail my grandfather polished till it wore thin as a wedding ring. You'll get no story out of me standing up.

Keep reading

Now, the keeper at Skerrin Head in the year of the big frost was a man called Tobias Quayle, and he had a wife named Agnes who could not abide a bare thing. Nothing grew on that rock but lichen and spite. So she sent away to a nursery in Perth for peonies, forty roots wrapped in brown paper, and she planted them in two long beds either side of the path up to the lamp. Every one went in by her own hands, kneeling in the wind with her skirts pinned up and a pipe clenched in her teeth that she'd borrowed off Tobias.

The first summer they bloomed, great heavy heads of white and crimson, folding over themselves like the frills on a Sunday petticoat. The fishing boats came round the point that July and saw those two rows of colour climbing the cliff from the sea, and they took their bearings off them, so the old men say, and never once put a hull on the rocks. Tobias called it foolishness. Agnes said a light needs something to point it, and she went on feeding the roots with seaweed and wood ash.

When the gale of 1891 took the lamp glass, it was the peonies the lads found standing, bent but unbroken, their leaves black with salt. The ships came home by them that winter. Mind the step at the top. They'll be coming into bud about now, and you can see them from the boat before you can see anything else.