Black and grey peony tattoo with two blooms and leaves on a forearm, shaded with stippled dotwork.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two peonies on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two peony blooms with layered petals and leaves sit one above the other on the forearm. The outlines are dark and the petals are built up with stippled dots and soft grey shading, leaving highlights in the lighter areas of skin. The design is in black and grey on a pale arm against a dark background, with the upper bloom angled towards the top edge of the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Peony Flower Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, the pair of you, and mind the wet on the step. My grandmother's peonies grew along the south wall of the vicarage at Hollin Cross, and every spring they came up red as a cut thumb and sulked for a week before they opened. She said you could not hurry a peony any more than you could hurry a bad tooth. You waited, and you kept the ants off with a bit of cinnamon, which is an old trick and works about as well as anything.

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One May the vicar's boy, Tobias Penhale, came over the wall with a stolen trowel and a head full of nonsense about digging up the bulbs for his mother's birthday. He was nine. My grandmother caught him by the collar, sat him on the step where you're sitting now, and told him the flowers were not the only thing in that garden that opened slow. Then she handed him the trowel and made him dig the bed for the new bush himself, from the spade's first bite to the last crumb of clay.

The bush he planted that day bloomed the year he went to sea, and it bloomed twice the next year. When he came home with a bottle of gin and a mermaid pinned to his arm, she only looked at the ink and said it was a fine heavy head of flowers, and that a man ought to know how many petals he has before he carries them about. He laughed. She didn't. Then she went out in the wet and cut the two best blooms, and they say he carried them up the hill to the churchyard himself, one in each hand, and never once put them down.