Black and grey dotwork peony tattoo with blue and teal wash accents and a dangling bead chain, on the upper back of a person with reddish hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony bouquet with blue wash on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large peony cluster with layered petals and leaves is drawn in black linework and dotwork stippling. Teal and blue wash splashes run through the leaves and down the design, with a fine bead chain and droplet hanging from the lower section. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame across the upper back, with the neck and hair visible at the top.

Botanical Dotwork Back Peony Flower Leaves Droplet Hair

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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

Sit down, all of you, and stop reaching for the bread, because this is the part of the wedding where somebody has to tell the truth about peonies. My grandmother's garden at Hollin Bank had forty bushes, and she swore to every one of them that she would never sell a bloom to a man who came asking in May.

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Along came a glass-blower called Tobias Quill, down from the coast with a painted cart and a pocketful of blue glass beads. He wanted her biggest peony, the one that had split its own petals in the spring rain. She said no. He stayed three nights in the barn, mixing teal wash in a jam jar and flicking it at the boards, and every morning the damp ran down the timber in streaks the colour of deep water.

On the fourth morning she walked out to the gate and found the big peony still on its stem, untouched, with a strand of beads hung from its heaviest head. Each bead had a single drop of blue glass at the bottom, and the last one swung just above the wet grass. He had not taken a single petal. He had only painted the leaves, dripped the rain down the stem and strung the beads so that she would see it every time she walked past.

She kept that bush for fifty-one years. The beads are in the tin on the dresser, and when the light comes through the kitchen window they throw blue spots across the table like rain that never quite landed. Now pass the cake knife down, Gareth, and mind the drip on the tablecloth.