Colour and grey Japanese style flower sleeve with red peonies and grey chrysanthemums covering the upper arm and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red peony and chrysanthemum arm sleeve

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A full arm sleeve of flowers, with large red peony blooms on the upper arm and forearm and grey chrysanthemum petals and leaves on the outer forearm. The red petals use solid colour with dark outlines, while the grey petals are shaded with fine stippled dots and soft tonal gradients. The arm is photographed from the side with a plain dark backdrop, and the subject's head is cropped out of frame.

Japanese Dotwork Upper arm Forearm Peony Chrysanthemum Flower Leaf Sleeve

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

At Hollin Cross the last train of the year ran late, so old Mrs Ferriby kept the lamp lit in the waiting room until it came in. Her mother had done the same, and her mother's mother before that. Each autumn they hung a grey chrysanthemum on the lamp post for the dead who rode the line home, and each spring a red peony for the living who were going out again.

Keep reading

One November a man stepped off that train with a battered case and no ticket. He asked for the stationmaster's wife by her married name, and she said she had buried that name with her husband in March. He smiled as if she had given the right answer. He said he had come to settle an old account, one begun in a spring that had gone wrong, and he opened his case to show her a bundle of paper peonies, folded so tight their petals had split at the creases.

She did not take them. She went instead to the back garden, where the one peony that had survived the frost was only a bud, closed and hard as a fist. She cut it with the kitchen knife and carried it in on a saucer. The stranger looked at it a long time, then out at the chrysanthemum on the lamp post, still grey with rain.

He left the bud on the saucer and walked out onto the platform, and the train took him without a whistle. In the morning the grey petals on the lamp post had reddened at their edges, and the peony on the saucer had opened in the night, its blood-coloured petals fallen across the table. Nobody at Hollin Cross ever learned which of them had won.