Colour Japanese-style full sleeve tattoo of peonies and shaded foliage on an upper arm and forearm, with a white vest visible beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peony full sleeve on an upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A person's arm is covered by a full sleeve tattoo with large peony flowers in pink, purple and blue, set among darker grey shaded leaves and scrolling forms. The shading is soft and the linework is bold, and the design wraps around the upper arm and down towards the forearm. The background shows a chain-link fence and a white sleeveless top, with the face not in frame.

Japanese Upper arm Forearm Peony Flower Floral Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peonies at Hollis Wood were never meant to be cut before the Saturday, but Dad had been watching the buds since April, and by Thursday night the big pink ones along the south wall had split their green paper as if they were in a hurry. I went out with the secateurs in my dressing gown and a torch clamped in my teeth, and counted eleven heads that would not last till morning.

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Mrs Okonedo from the next cottage had won the double bloom cup every summer for twelve years, and she had never once mentioned the wall. Dad said that was how you knew she was cross. I carried the buckets up the lane in the dark, the purple ones heavy as wet washing, the pale blue ones gone almost grey where the light had not yet reached them. Nobody in the village grew a blue peony. Dad said the colour came from the soil and a stubbornness nobody could buy.

At the hall on Saturday the judges moved along the trestle tables with their clipboards and their small, grave faces. I stood guard over our table with the buckets hidden under a cloth and watched Mrs Okonedo's entries go past, then the vicar's sweet peas, then a jar of bramble jam that nobody would taste. When the envelope came out, the card did not say Best Bloom. It said Best Foliage, and the judge tapped the dark glossy leaves under the blossom and said they held the colour back so the flowers looked lit from inside.

Dad said nothing. He took the scissors from my pocket, snipped one more bloom from the wall he had been saving, and set it on Mrs Okonedo's table where she would see it first thing, with a folded note under the stem that read, for next year.