Black and grey full sleeve tattoo with red poppies, a bird, a skull and German text, shown from two angles on an arm.

Bird, poppies and skull full sleeve

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A full sleeve tattoo with a large dark bird with spread wings near the shoulder, red poppies running down the upper arm, and a shaded skull near the elbow. Printed German text in a typewriter-style font runs down the middle of the arm among loose linework and ink splatter. The shading is soft and painterly in black and grey, with the poppies in red as the main colour accent, and the two views show the sleeve from front and side.

Realism Botanical Lettering Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Bird Skull Poppy Ink splatter Sleeve Linework

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth found the tin under the potting bench on the morning the rooks came down heavy on the far field, its lid so rusted it had to be prised open with a trowel. Inside, tied with garden twine, were eleven letters in pale blue envelopes, all addressed to her husband Walter in a looping hand, all postmarked Hamburg, all dated the spring before he had taken her to the coast for their honeymoon and never once mentioned a German girl.

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She sat on the upturned bucket and read them with the kitchen dictionary open on her knee. Sehnsucht, she learned, was the word the writer kept returning to, and it had no tidy English. Longing, the dictionary offered, and then, less kindly, yearning, as if the thing were a crop that needed watering. The last letter ended with a line about the poppies coming up along the railway embankment, and a packet of seed folded inside the final sheet, dry and papery, sealed with a stamp nobody had used since 1951.

She sowed them along the stone wall where the old collie lay, scattering the seed into thin soil and pressing it down with the flat of her hand. Then she sat at the kitchen table, took out her own notepaper and wrote, in careful capitals so there could be no mistake, that Walter had died in March, that the garden was still his, and that the seed had arrived too late to be a gift but not too late to grow.

The first bloom opened on a Thursday, a red so bright against the grey stone that Ruth stood at the window with her tea going cold. Out on the far field the rooks lifted all at once, black wings spread wide against the sky, and she posted the letter before the morning was out.