Black linework peony tattoo with dotwork shading and dotted arcs on the inner upper arm, in a fine line botanical style.

Peony tattoo on the inner upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large peony bloom with layered petals and several leaves is drawn in black linework on the inner upper arm, with dotted arcs and small dot accents on the left side. The petals use fine hatching and stippled shading for depth, while the outlines stay thin and even. The design is in black ink only and fills the frame against a plain light background.

Fine line Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Peony Flower Leaves Dot Arc

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 bulbs come up the tip road in a Co-op bag, and you carry them the last half mile with your thumb hooked through the handles because you do not trust anyone else to keep them upright. Nothing on Stoneyhope Row grows taller than a cabbage. The spoil heap behind the baths has been black since the winter of 1947, and the men say the only things that thrive on it are thistles and the odd fox. Your grandmother pressed a fist of coal dust into your palm before she died and told you to dig deeper than sense allows, so you do.

Keep reading

You dig with a borrowed spade, and when the ground is too hard you use a bar, and when the bar slips you bleed a little and keep going. You set each root in a half circle, the way the pit wheel turned over the shaft, and you mark the ground with a line of stones so the spacing holds. In the evenings you sit on the step with a jar of stewed tea and a pencil, drawing the petals from the seed catalogue, folding and unfolding the paper until the layers stop looking flat.

The first summer they come up as leaves only. The second, a single bud the size of a fist sits fat and green for a week, then splits, and the whole row comes out to look. Mrs Pryce says it looks like a cabbage that has been to finishing school. Old Dai from the lamp room says nothing at all, just stands at your gate with his cap in his hands until the sun goes off the heap. The third summer they open heavy and pale pink, and the bees stagger drunk between them, and the black ground turns to something you could almost call soil.

In August the checker from the colliery office stops at the fence with his clipboard and asks whether you know they cannot grow up here. You tell him they have. You cut the biggest bloom and leave it on his side of the gate, and he looks at it for a long time before he takes his cap off, the way Dai does, and walks on up the road with the petals going soft in his hand.