Two-panel photo of a botanical tattoo of pink peony and rose flowers with green leaves wrapping the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink peony and rose on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows large pink peony-style blooms and a smaller open rose, surrounded by green leaves and fern-like sprigs with a few small buds. The flowers have soft pink shading and fine dark outlines, while the leaves use grey-green tones with darker shading. The two panels show the same forearm from opposite sides, with plain dark clothing and a light background.

Botanical Forearm Peony Rose Flower Leaves Fern Bud Floral

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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

Mother never let anyone touch the peony bed before the first frost, so I was on my knees in the wet March border with a borrowed trowel when the post van stopped at the gate and the driver shouted that there was a parcel for Miss Hale that smelled of soil. It was a biscuit tin tied with twine. Inside, wrapped in newspaper from Lincoln, were three bare root cuttings and a letter in my aunt's sloping hand.

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The letter said Aunt Wynn had stopped being able to kneel. It said the rose by her porch had been planted the year my father came home from the war, and that the peony had come from a cutting of a cutting, traded over a garden wall in Suffolk for a jar of damson jam. "Put the pink one where the morning sun reaches first," she had written. "The rose will sulk in shade and forgive you for anything else."

I planted the peony first, deeper than the instructions said, because Wynn had always planted deeper than anyone. The rose went beside the south wall where the bricks held the heat. By June the small open bloom had spread its petals wide, and a fern-like sprig had crept between the leaves like a dare. The buds on the other stem swelled slowly, green and then rosy, and I stopped scolding them for taking their time.

In July I walked the empty tin back to the post office and sent Wynn a photograph of the peony in full head, pale pink as a cheek. Her reply came a week later, one line in pencil: "Good. Now you must divide it in autumn, and you will hate every minute." I laughed alone in the potting shed and went out to find the fork.