Neo-traditional peony tattoo in red, peach and cream with green leaves and buds, wrapping across the outer thigh and hip.

Peony cluster on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A cluster of peonies in full bloom and closed buds spreads diagonally across the outer thigh and hip. The flowers are outlined in bold black lines with layered red petals and softer peach and cream blooms, and the leaves are shaded in several greens. The photo is taken from the side, with the tattoo filling most of the frame against a blurred light background.

Neo-trad Botanical Thigh Peony Flower Bud Leaves Floral

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

Come closer, the lot of you, and mind the lamp oil. I mean the old Empress, the one whose orders the winter itself was supposed to obey. She woke one morning to frost on her sill and a poem in her head, and she sent a clerk through every garden in the capital with a red seal and a single demand. Bloom in the snow, all of you, before the year turns.

Keep reading

The plum trees agreed at once, being sensible. The orchids, the jasmine and the narcissus in their porcelain bowls all unfolded like good servants. Only the peonies at the bottom of Mistress Ruo's garden, past the broken wall, stayed shut tight in their black-green leaves. Her grandfather had carried their roots across three rivers, and he always said peonies do not hurry for anyone, not even a throne.

So the clerk came back with his seal and his sword, and Ruo walked him down to the wall. She knelt in the frost, poured a cup of warm rice wine over the roots, and sang the old harvest song that nobody sings any more because it is too slow. Her hands went blue. Then the buds began to split, and not in one colour. Red as lacquer, peach like the inside of a shell, cream like candle wax. Snow settled on them and they did not care.

The Empress was furious, then curious, then wept, though she never admitted it. She sent the flowers to Luoyang in carts padded with silk. Ruo kept one bud back, folded in her sleeve, and when the carts were gone she pressed it into a crack in the wall. That is why, when you walk through the old capital in spring, you still find peonies growing out of the stone.