Abstract floral tattoo on a calf with loose black linework, blue and red splashes of colour and a trailing stem reaching towards the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Abstract poppies down a calf

Calf · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows loose, abstract flower shapes joined by a thin, wandering black stem that runs from the upper calf towards the ankle. The linework is sketchy and unevenly weighted, with soft blue and red washes and small dark specks scattered around the petal-like forms. The design is set against a plain skin background with a blurred indoor setting and dark seat behind the leg.

Calf Poppy Flower Abstract shape Splatter Stem

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

Sit down, all of you, the soup is still warm and I have not finished my tea. Weddings are for telling the truth about flowers, and this one is about the poppies that grew up the lane from the chapel the year the bells were melted down. My grandmother's grandmother said the red came from the blood of the miller's son, but that is only what people say when they have been drinking. The real trouble was the stem.

Keep reading

It ran from the top of the churchyard wall, thin as a hair and black as a crow's wing, and it wandered. It did not go straight to anywhere. It turned back on itself, it stopped to look at the ditch, it forgot where it was going and dropped a little splash of ink whenever it grew tired. Every bloom that tried to open along it came out loose and wet at the edges, as if the paint had not yet decided what shape it wanted to be. The old women said a poppy that cannot find its own stem will grow wherever the sun happens to be standing.

So the flowers went looking. They drifted down the hill to the harbour, past the nets and the cats, and every one of them left a smear of blue where it had brushed the water and a dot of red where it had stopped to rest. By the time the last one reached the sea, the lane was dotted with colour the whole way down, and the stem was only a line you could follow if you already knew which way home was.

Pour the wine now. The stem still wanders, and that is the point of it.