Colour botanical tattoo of roses, peonies and sweet peas spilling across the upper arm and shoulder, with a lace top visible beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vintage botanical flowers on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large floral tattoo of roses, a pink peony, sweet peas and smaller blue and red blooms, with green leaves and stems, climbs from the upper arm towards the shoulder. The shading is soft and painterly, with fine outlines and gentle tonal gradations that resemble a vintage botanical illustration. Warm pinks, reds and greens dominate against the skin, and the design is framed by a white lace top and a pendant necklace at the edge of the photo.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Rose Peony Flower Bouquet Leaves Stem Blue flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hollis had asked for the sweet peas first, because her husband had grown them along the garden wall and she wanted them drawn before the frost took the last of the vines. Thomas Greave, who had painted flowers for the Leeds nursery for eleven years, did not argue. He set his easel by the window, mixed a little carmine into his lake, and began with the tendrils, which were the hardest, because they never kept still long enough to be looked at.

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By the third week the commission had grown. She wanted roses, a pink peony from the bed by the gate, the small blue bells that came up in the damp corner, and something red and tight at the centre that she would not name. Thomas painted each bloom on its own sheet first, then laid them on a board to see how they would sit together. He found that the arrangement wanted to climb, so he let it climb, from the lower margin up towards the edge of the page where the paper curled.

On the last afternoon she came to see it and stood a long while without speaking. Then she said her husband had always pinned the roses higher than the peony, because the peony was the one he had courted her with, and she had never told him she preferred the roses. Thomas said nothing. He took up his smallest brush, found the exact warm red, and lowered the rose a quarter inch so the peony rose above it, as she had wished all along.