Purple ink sketch of two peony flowers with leaves and a long stem, drawn as a botanical tattoo design in a spiral sketchbook.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two peony flowers in purple ink sketch

Botanical · Colour · Flash

The drawing shows two peony-style flowers, one above and one below, joined by a long diagonal stem with large leaves. The outlines are drawn in a single purple ink with fine, even linework, and the petals and stamens are detailed with small dotted marks. The flowers are drawn on a page of a spiral sketchbook, with a purple felt pen lying across the right side of the composition.

Botanical Peony Flower Leaf Stem Sketch

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 cold drawer in Hab Nine has been opened only twice in your mother's time, and today the seal gives with a sigh you feel in your back teeth. Inside, under a sheet of grey foil, lies a sketchbook with its spiral wire bent back at one corner. Nobody aboard the Tallow has drawn anything by hand in eighty years. The paper is soft as cloth and smells faintly of graphite dust.

Keep reading

Two flowers fill the first page, one blooming from the top right, the other sprawling from the lower left, joined by a long stem that wanders down the paper like a rope somebody forgot to coil. Every petal is outlined in a violet that has held its colour far better than the people who made it. The centres are a crowd of tiny dots, each placed by a steady hand. Beside them a purple pen lies capped, its clip angled toward you as though it expects you to finish the job.

The archivist, Odile Vance, once told you that peonies were called the flower of wealth in the old records, and that every graft in the orchards died during the second blight. You carry the book up to the lamp room and trace the stem with your thumb. Then you twist the cap off the pen. The nib still smells of ink, and your hand hovers over an empty space beside the lower bloom where a petal might go.

You draw one petal, slowly, and the line bleeds a little into the paper. By morning the ink has dried, and under the north window the hydroponic trays show a green shoot no taller than a thumbnail. In the logbook you write its name as the pen's name, then underline it twice.