Black and grey peony tattoo in dotwork shading covering a woman's shoulder and upper back, with leaves reaching towards the neck.

Peony cluster on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Three peony blooms with layered petals and several leaves fill the shoulder and reach towards the neck, drawn in bold outlines. The petals are shaded with fine stippled dots that build soft tonal depth. The design is in black and grey only, set against pale skin and a plain pale wall, with the subject's dark hair and black top framing the composition.

Botanical Dotwork Shoulder Peony Flower Leaves Petal

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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

Dear Win, the third bloom opened on Tuesday, the same morning the carrier brought your parcel, so you may take that as a sign or as the weather, whichever suits your opinion of me. I have pinned the cutting of the old pink double beside the back step where Father used to lean his bicycle. Its leaves have gone grey at the edges, the way his moustache did at the end, but it carries three buds, and I count them every evening like a miser counting coppers.

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Mrs Pennock came round on Thursday wanting to buy the lot. I told her the peonies were not for sale, that a thing grown from a root in a dead man's garden cannot be put on a ledger. She laughed and said I was getting sentimental, then stood a long while over the dark one by the wall, the one with petals like crumpled tissue, and asked how I got the shading so soft. I said I did nothing. I sat with it through the dull hours, and each rise of colour was a dot of the pen, a thousand small patient touches, until the whole head looked as if it might breathe.

She bought one stem in the end, and paid in threepenny bits that she counted onto the potting bench one at a time, the way you pay for something you mean to keep. I have made no sense of it. Perhaps I have made no sense of anything since the spring, but the sensible course would be to dig up the lot and sell it by the bucket.

Come at Whitsun if you can. Bring the fine nib, and your good spectacles, because my eyes will not hold a dot now, and by then the blooms will be going over, dropping their petals on the step like tissue paper nobody wants.