Colour tattoo of four peony flowers in red, pink and orange with green leaves, running down the spine on a person's back.

Peony flowers down a back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

Four large peony blooms are stacked vertically along the spine, with broad green leaves between them. The petals are shaded with soft gradients and fine detail, giving them a lifelike, painterly finish. The palette is dominated by red, coral, pink and orange ink, set against plain, untattooed skin.

Botanical Realism Back Peony Flower 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

Sit down, sit down, and mind the crisps, they're not yours. Right. You want the one about the peonies, the four that grew up the back wall of the Palais, where the bins are now. Your great-granny swore they were planted the spring the hall reopened after the flood, when the floor was still wet and the band had to play on planks.

Keep reading

Nobody had a garden in those days, not behind a dance hall. But a man called Walter Sowerby had a barrow and a grudge against the council, and he dug a strip by the fire door and set in four roots a seed merchant on Cross Street had given him for nothing. Peonies, he said, last longer than a marriage and bloom harder than a brass section. Each one opened a little later than the last, so the wall went red, then rose, then burnt orange, then that deep pink that looks like a bruise going off. You could tell the summer by them.

The year the ballroom shut for the war, Walter's girl Edie came back from the munitions works with her hair tied in a scarf and no shoes she'd admit to. She'd promised the band she'd dance the first waltz when the lights came back on. She didn't. She went out the fire door at dusk and picked every bloom off the bottom bush and left the stems lying in the rain. When Walter asked her why, she said the lights had been off too long for anything to be worth keeping whole.

The top peony still flowers, mind. Red as a pillar box. Walter always said that one was Edie, and the others were the dancers who came back to find her gone. Off you go now. And if anyone asks whether it's true, tell them the flowers came back every single year, which is more than most of us managed.