Black and grey botanical tattoo of peony blooms, buds and leaves on a raised upper arm, with a smiling woman in a white top beside it.

Peony tattoo on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a raised arm showing a tattoo of two peony blooms, two buds and several leaves. The linework is fine and the petals are shaded with soft grey tones, with the largest flower sitting near the centre of the design. The arm fills the upper left of the frame, with the woman's smile and white top on the right and a plain room behind.

Botanical Upper arm Peony Flower Bud Leaf Botanical

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 lorry from the Dutch growers is late again, so you stand under the sodium lamps on the loading bay at half three, counting buckets of peonies that have not opened yet. The buds are tight as fists, the colour of bruised plums, and the wholesaler's man says they will sell by Friday if they wake up. You have been told peonies open when they are ready and not a minute before, and that the only trick is warmth. Nobody on the night shift believes that, any more than they believe the tea urn works.

Keep reading

Mrs Adeyemi from the florist on Cable Street comes in at five in her green wax jacket and asks for the big white ones. You tell her they are still closed. She laughs and says her grandmother kept a peony in a biscuit tin under the stairs so the whole house would smell it coming. You carry the bucket out to her van anyway, and she takes one bud wrapped in yesterday's newspaper, the way you might take a stray cat home.

By seven the hall is thick with steam off the radiators and the buds have loosened. One by one they unfold at the edges, the outer petals curling back like the pages of a book left open in a damp room. You stand between the stacked crates with your hands in your pockets and watch a flower that has been shut all night decide, in the space of ten minutes, to be enormous.

You tell yourself it is only the heat. Then the first bloom reaches the far end of the bay, its shadowed folds catching the light the way ash catches it on a wet street, and you find you are holding your breath as you did as a child at the fireworks, waiting for the whole sky to go up at once.