Two circular black ink line drawings of a peony and a rose surrounded by leaves and foliage, on white paper beside black fineliner pens.

Peony and rose pen drawings in circles

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

Two circular floral designs are drawn in black ink on white paper, one showing a large peony and the other a rose, each surrounded by leaves and smaller blooms. The linework is fine and precise, with dense hatching and stippled shading that builds the petals and foliage. The drawings are shown in black and white on a wooden table, with two black pens lying across the top edge of the sheet.

Botanical Fine line Peony Rose Flower Leaves Fern Foliage

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

Nobody at the Palais on a Saturday wants to hear about peonies, but Dolly Harrigan talked about nothing else through the whole of the quickstep. Her cheek sat on my shoulder, her eyes on the bandstand, and she kept counting petals under her breath as if the band might drop one. She had drawn them for her sister's wedding, two circles on a sheet of cartridge paper, a fat peony on the left and a rose on the right, each ringed with ferns she'd filled in one tiny stroke at a time with a pen she bought from the stationer on Church Street.

Keep reading

The trouble, she said, was the ferns. Anyone can draw a flower. Getting the shadows to sit under the leaves without going muddy took her three evenings and most of her patience. Her sister Mavis had wanted roses only, and Dolly kept slipping peonies in, ruffled and heavy as the bridesmaids' skirts, because peonies were what their mother had grown along the back wall of the terrace. Mavis cried when she saw the proof. Then she laughed and said the peony looked like it was about to shout.

The band took a breath and the floor emptied around us. I still have that sheet, folded into four and gone soft at the creases, with a coffee ring over the rose. Dolly died the winter after Mavis's second child was born, and I didn't dance again for years. Now I put the drawing on the kitchen table when the kettle's on and trace the hatching with one finger, the way she did, counting the lines until they blur into a dark ring of leaves that never quite closes.