Black and grey dotwork peony tattoo with leaves on the inner forearm, shown against a pale background.

Two peonies on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two full peony blooms, one above the other, with sprigs of pointed leaves around them. The petals are outlined with fine linework and shaded with dense stippled dots, giving depth and soft gradations of grey. The design sits diagonally on the forearm against a plain light background, with the dark sleeve of a top at the right edge of the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Peony Flower 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 peonies come down from the Calder Valley in May, packed in wet cardboard that smells of compost and diesel, and I unpack them at five in the morning on platform four before the first commuter has found the kettle. They are heavy things. A full bloom hangs its head as if someone has asked it a question it does not want to answer, and every petal has to be lifted by the edge so the dew does not bruise it.

Keep reading

Ray Haddow, who has signalled on the Settle line for thirty-one years, buys two from me every Thursday while they are in season. Not one, two. He never explains, and I never ask until the third week, when I hand him the paper cone and he says, "One for the north-bound, one for the south." He points at the departure board, where the two trains are printed one above the other, and laughs at my face. "Only one of them's coming back the way it went."

That morning the cone held a pair of blooms, one fully open and ruffled like a crumpled skirt, the other still tight at the centre, a pale green knot waiting for warmth. I had wrapped them myself. Ray took the cone without looking inside, and I thought that was the end of it.

He came back at half past nine with the tight one still in his hand, unopened. "Didn't take the trip," he said, and he put it in my palm like a coin. "Keep it out of the sun. It'll open when it's ready, and you'll be the one who sees it." I stood it in a glass under the till, and by the afternoon it had split open, one petal at a time, while I wasn't watching.