Colour tattoo of a large pink peony with green leaves on the shoulder, in a Japanese-influenced style, with a second close view of the same design beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink peony with green leaves on a shoulder

Japanese · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A large pink peony fills most of the frame, with layered petals outlined in darker red and lighter highlights, and a yellow and teal centre. Green leaves with dark outlines surround the flower at the edges. The image shows the tattoo from two angles side by side, with a dark vignette around the edges.

Japanese Botanical Shoulder Peony Flower Petal Leaves

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 petals are already loosening when you reach the edge of Hollin Wood, so you carry the bloom cupped in both hands like a bird you have not yet decided to keep. Mrs Pryce at the post office swears the peony was planted by a travelling nurseryman's widow before the railway came, and that it only opens for people who have stopped pretending. You do not believe her. But the bush is there, pushed up against the holly, its leaves glossy as wet slate, and the frill of pink where the thorn fence breaks is exactly as she described.

Keep reading

You kneel in the leaf litter and listen. Past the stile a dog barks twice and stops. A blackbird works through the hedge. You have brought a trowel wrapped in a tea towel and a letter you wrote four times at the kitchen table, each draft torn and fed to the range. The letter is for Thomas Greave, who took the cart north in March and never wrote back. Each petal is the same rose shade, layered over the next like pages in a ledger nobody has balanced.

You lift the stamens, yellow and fine as fishbone, and find the centre is not yellow at all but a teal so bright it seems to hum. You had expected the bush to give you a sign. Instead it gives you permission to go home. You bury the letter beneath the roots, press the soil flat with your palm, and leave the peony where it stands. On the lane back, Mrs Pryce is already on her step, watching the road. She does not ask. She only nods at the petal stuck to your cuff, and you realise the flower has come home with you after all, and you are not yet sure whether that is a comfort or a debt.