Realistic colour tattoo of purple peonies and green leaves with a faint lace outline, placed on the outer thigh.

Purple peonies with lace detail on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows several purple peony blooms, one large open flower at the centre with smaller blooms and buds around it, joined by green leaves and stems. A fine reddish-brown lace-like outline frames the flowers in a loose circle behind them. The petals are shaded with soft gradients of violet, mauve and pink, with green leaves and stems giving depth, and the flowers fill most of the frame against pale skin.

Botanical Realism Thigh Peony Flower Bud Leaf Lace Stem

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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

Ada was on her knees in the wet bed when the carrier's van pulled into the lane, and she did not get up to meet it. Three crates of peony roots had come from a nursery in Holland, each one wrapped in sacking and smelling of cellar, and the invoice promised purple, though the photograph on the crate had faded behind someone's kitchen window. She pushed her fingers into the cold earth and felt for the eyes, the pale buds sleeping under the soil like knots in a skein.

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Her mother had made lace at the kitchen table for forty years, bobbins clicking through the afternoons while the radio talked about rationing and then about the moon. The pattern on the pillow was a loose ring of little diamonds and wheels, and Ada had copied it onto the backs of seed packets when she was small, drawing with a blunt pencil while her mother counted pins. Nobody had told her then that lace is only holes held together by thread.

By June the first bloom opened on the south border, heavy-headed and the colour of a bruise going yellow at the edges, too big for its stem. Ada cut it for the kitchen table, where her mother's pillow still sat under its cloth. She laid the flower on the lace and it seemed to fit the pattern exactly, the petals filling the gaps the way thread fills a design, as if the two had been made for each other all along.

That week Ada pressed the rest of the blooms between the pages of the pattern book, and when they were dry the petals had crept into every open diamond, so that each page looked like a window someone had forgotten to close. Her mother would have said it was a waste of good peonies. Ada left the book on the table anyway, where the afternoon light came through.