Close-up of a soft pink peony tattoo with grey-shaded leaves and sprigs of foliage across a woman's upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony and foliage on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A pink peony with a smaller bud sits at the centre of the design, with grey-shaded leaves and thin sprigs of foliage curling around it. The linework is fine and dark, and the petals are softly shaded in pink and peach while the leaves use grey wash for depth. The tattoo wraps over the upper arm and shoulder, with the subject's dark hair and white top framing the image.

Botanical Neo-trad Upper arm Shoulder Peony Rose Flower Leaves Foliage Sprig 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

The peony arrived on the supply boat in a biscuit tin packed with wet sacking, and the boatman swore it would be dead by Michaelmas. My mother took it from him anyway. She set it in a half barrel at the foot of the tower, where the spray came over the wall whenever the wind backed south, and she talked to it the way she talked to the gulls, the foghorn and my father when he was sulking.

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Nothing about the rock wanted flowers. The soil was a thin crust we had carried up in sacks from the mainland, and the salt crept into every leaf until they went the grey of old pewter. I hauled water up the hundred and twelve steps twice a day, a bucket in each hand, and resented every drop. But the rosemary she tucked in beside it held on, and so did the thing she called a bud, a tight knot of pink that did not open for two summers.

It opened the week the Halvard went down off the Skerries. The lamp had to burn through three nights of blow, and the relief boat could not make the landing, so I kept the wick trimmed and the glass clean while the wind tried to prise the shutters loose. On the fourth morning the sea lay flat and pale, and I looked down from the gallery to find the peony split wide, every petal the colour of the inside of a shell. I cut one stem with the kitchen knife, tied it to the lamp-room rail with twine, and watched it sway in the turn of the light, bright every twenty seconds against the grey water.