Colour tattoo of a black bird with red wing patches on a bare branch, beside large red poppies, on a thigh.

Blackbird and red poppies on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A black bird with red and yellow wing patches perches on a leafless branch, with two red poppies, one large and one partly hidden, and dried poppy seed heads below. The bird is shaded in soft greys and blacks, while the poppies use bold reds and dark centres with painterly edges. The tattoo wraps across the outer thigh against a white brick wall.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Harrow Fen had ever seen a blackbird wear a red epaulette until the spring the Pell sisters let the poppies go to seed. Marjorie said the field had done it, that the bird had sat too long in all that red and soaked it up through its shoulders. Her sister Ivy said the bird had been paid. They argued about it over the drying racks every afternoon, shaking the grey pods over newspaper so the seed fell like black sand.

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The bird came to the dead plum by the shed each dusk and watched them work. It never took a seed from the trays, which Ivy respected, and it never sang, which Marjorie held against it. When the frost arrived early that October, Ivy found the bird on the lowest branch with its feet tucked up, stiff as a clothes peg, and she sat beside it for an hour before she could bring herself to move it.

Marjorie wanted to burn the last of the seed heads. Ivy would not. She carried the final tray out to the field, cracked the husks under her boot, and scattered the seed where the red had been thickest, talking the whole time about the price of paraffin and the vicar's dog. By March there were poppies again, three of them, and a blackbird on the plum branch with a red stripe that had not been there before.

Marjorie never said she had seen it. She only began shaking the pods more gently after that, so the seed would drop where a bird could reach it.

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