Three-panel image of a woman's back: a large colour tattoo of a woman's face, red poppies and a pocket watch, and a black-and-grey spine design with a bird-like shape below.

Back tattoos with portrait, poppies and clock

Back · Mixed · Photo

The left and middle panels show a large back piece with a tattooed woman's face in a sketchy, painterly style, framed by red and orange poppies, a pocket watch and loose black brushstrokes. A banner reads BELIEVE, with smaller lines of text beside it. The right panel shows a separate black-and-grey design running down the spine, with a tribal-style bird or wing shape across the lower back.

Back Woman Portrait Poppy Flower Clock Pocket watch Banner Text Bird Spine Feather

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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 closer, the lamp's going to gutter and I'll not tell this twice. On Scarrow the poppies come up through the cracks in the harbour wall every June, red as a rash, and the old men say they're the only thing on the island that never once kept time. Our clock was the one on the chapel tower, stopped at twenty to four since the winter the boats didn't come back.

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Bridie Sanderson kept the pocket watch that had belonged to her husband, Tom, a wireless man on the ferry. She carried it everywhere, and every morning she wound it and read the word painted on the chapel door years before, BELIEVE, because it was the only word left on the island that still had any weight. The ferry captain, a sour man named Orrin Vale, laughed at her. He said a watch that ran fast was no use to anybody, and a watch that ran true could still lie if you let it.

One June the poppies burst so thick over the wall that the children couldn't find the path down to the slip. Bridie walked out with the watch open in her palm, the black sea climbing the rocks to meet her, and she set the hands to the second. Somewhere out past the skerries a bell rang, and the ferry's lamp swung round toward home.

They say Orrin came in on that tide, soaked to the collar, and asked her what time it was. She held the watch up to him. It was twenty to four, and it was running again. Mind you, that's what the old men say, and they've never once been on time for anything.