Colour tattoo of pink peonies with small blue flowers and green leaves across an upper arm and shoulder, in a botanical style.

Pink peonies and blue blossoms on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A cluster of large pink peony blooms with pale petal edges sits beside smaller blue-violet flowers, green leaves and fine sprigs. The petals use soft gradual shading and bold dark outlines, with yellow stamens at the centre of the main flower. The design fills the upper arm and shoulder, with the largest peony at the top and a second bloom lower down.

Botanical Neo-trad Upper arm Shoulder Peony Flower Blossom Leaves Sprig Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dilys had the bread in by four, as she always did, and by half past five the ovens were ticking as they cooled. The wedding order sat on the steel table under a tea towel: three tiers, and on the top one, the peonies the bride had asked for in a message that ran to nine lines and ended with "please, not too perfect."

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She piped the first bloom with a petal tip, thinned buttercream tinted with a drop of rose, working outward from the centre where she pressed a few yellow dots with a cocktail stick. It came out lopsided, which was fine. Her father's always had. He had sold bread from a van on the coast road for thirty years and drawn peonies on the backs of delivery notes while the kettle boiled, and he had never once said a flower was finished.

The second bloom was harder. The buttercream slumped in the warm kitchen, and the pale edges she wanted kept bleeding back into the pink. She stood with the bag in her hand and watched the window over the sink. The car park had gone the colour of the icing, a soft, streaky rose, and a delivery bike ticked past the gate with its lamp still on.

She left the slumped petal alone and set the cake in its box. By nine the van would be on the coast road, and by eleven someone would lift the lid and find a flower that looked as though it had been opened in a hurry, which, Dilys thought, was exactly how the morning had gone.