Black and grey peony flash drawing with dotwork shading and leaves, shown on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony flash design with leaves

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A large peony bloom with a smaller bud and several leaves, drawn as a tattoo design on white paper. The outlines are bold and the petals are shaded with stippled dotwork that builds depth towards the centre of the flower. The image is entirely black ink and grey tones with no colour.

Botanical Dotwork Peony Flower Bud Leaves Petal

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

The peonies came up Church Row in Tovey's van the week the rain finally stopped, wrapped in wet sacking and smelling of cut grass. Nobody in Hobbsfield had ordered them. Mrs Pargeter had died in March with her front garden still full of the old pink ones she planted before the war, and her nephew from Leeds had sold the house before anyone thought to dig them up. So the roots came to me, because the post office was the only building on the row that kept its door open past four.

Keep reading

There were nine plants in the crate, most of them bare-stemmed and sulking. The largest had a single head already swollen and tight, its outer petals curled back like the collar of a good coat. I kept it out of the draught on the counter while Mr Tovey waited for his signature, and I thought it looked less like a flower than a stack of folded letters, every layer tucked inside the next.

Walter Dunn came in for his pension that Friday and stopped dead at the sight of it. He had gone to art college in Nottingham before his chest gave out, and he still carried a pen nib in his waistcoat pocket. He asked for a scrap of paper, and in ten minutes he had drawn the bloom on the back of a parcel slip, bold round outlines and then, very slowly, dot after dot in the shadows, so the middle seemed to sink into itself the way a bloom does when you look too long. 'It takes a while,' he said, 'but you get there.'

I pinned the drawing above the scales and watched the real one open over the next nine days, a petal at a time, until the pink I had been waiting for finally arrived. When Mrs Pargeter's nephew wrote to ask whether anything had survived the sale, I sent back a note saying the bloom was on my windowsill, that it had taken its time, and that it had got there.