Painted traditional-style peony with green leaves on a bark-edged wooden slice, shown against a grey wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional peony painted on a wooden slice

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A large red peony bloom with cream highlights and dark olive-green leaves is painted onto an oval slice of wood that keeps its bark edge. The petals are outlined in bold black with flat red and pink fills, and the black background behind the flower is shaded in solid black. The piece sits centred on a plain grey surface, with the flower filling most of the oval.

Traditional Botanical Peony Flower Leaves Wood

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

Brother Osric had the slice on two trestles in the cloister walk, its bark still clinging to the edge like a wet coat, and the light from the herb garden came in low across the flags. The abbot wanted a peony on it for the guesthouse wall, the kind pilgrims once carried painted on their pack straps. Osric had only ever painted psalter initials, and those no bigger than a thumbnail, so he sat a long while before he touched the wood.

Keep reading

He began with the black, because the flower would sit in darkness and the darkness had to be finished first. He mixed lamp soot with linseed on a cracked saucer from the kitchen and laid it flat behind the bloom, working outward until the oval looked like a night sky with the lid pulled down. Then he drew round each petal in a line so heavy it could be read from the gatehouse, the way the old scribes outlined their capitals. Red went on in thin passes, pink over it, and the cream he saved for the highlights, dabbed on with the tip of a goose feather.

Brother Cuthbert came to watch on the third evening, leaning on his hoe with dirt on his knees. He said the centre was too hot, that the real ones opened paler at the heart. Osric said the real ones were gone by Michaelmas and this one would still be hanging here in a hundred years. Cuthbert grunted and went back to the beds. The next morning Osric found him standing over the single bloom that had opened overnight, and it was the same as the painting, down to the cream blush at the petal tips and the olive leaves folded round it like hands.

That afternoon Osric hung the slice on a nail above the guest door. The bark edge caught the sun, so the flower seemed cut from a living trunk and still rooted somewhere beneath the plaster.