Black and grey botanical tattoo of two peonies and rosebuds with leaves on the outer thigh, shown in a close photo of a woman wearing a patterned skirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony and rose cluster on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two large open peony or rose blooms with a smaller bud above and another bud below, surrounded by leaves and stems. The linework is fine and detailed, with soft shading on the petals that gives the flowers volume. The design is rendered entirely in black and grey ink and wraps vertically along the outer thigh, with a brick wall in the background.

Botanical Realism Thigh Peony Rose Flower Bud Leaves Stem

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

Agnes Corrigan had counted the flags of the south terrace twice before she admitted the roses were not coming back. Hollin Keep had been a ruin since her grandfather's day, its curtain wall split like a dropped plate, but someone had planted the rose bed against the old brick, and for forty years it had sulked and bloomed by turns. This spring it had given her one bud and a smear of greenfly.

Keep reading

The solicitor's letter lay on the sill under a stone shaped like a fist. It said the estate would pass to whoever could produce the deed to the garden, and the only deed anyone had ever seen was a drawing: two open blooms, a bud above, a bud below, leaves shaded in pencil along the stems, signed by a woman called Honora Vane who had died in 1791 with the keep still standing. Agnes had spent a week finding no such thing.

On the eighth night she took a candle to the cellar steps where the wall had cracked, and found behind a loose brick a tin box of cuttings, each wrapped in waxed paper and labelled in the same brown hand. The peonies had been grafted onto the roses, Honora had written, so that neither would forget how to open. Agnes laughed aloud at that, alone in the dark, then stopped laughing.

She went out at dawn with a trowel and planted the cuttings against the brick, lower than the others, where the old bud still leaned out from the stem. By the time the solicitor came up the lane the first petal had unfurled, pale as a page, and she was already tying the paper to the wall with string. The deed, she decided, could wait for the next frost.