Black and grey botanical sleeve of poppies, anemones and leaves covering a woman's upper arm and shoulder.

Botanical flower sleeve on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large floral sleeve covers the upper arm and shoulder, featuring poppy blooms, an anemone-like flower, seed heads and leafy stems. The linework is dark and clean, with soft grey shading inside the petals and leaves. The design wraps around the arm from the shoulder down towards the elbow, against a plain purple top and a lightly lit room.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Poppy Flower Anemone Leaves Seed head Wildflower Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the Hollow Pike road by noon, so the carrier left his mules in the yard and came in shaking the white off his coat. Mags Thorne put a bowl of barley broth in front of him and didn't ask where he'd been, because nobody asked a man where he'd been in February. Her father had always said the poppies knew the snow was coming before the sky did, and that was why they dropped their heads and went to seed in the autumn.

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Up on the windowsill of the back room lay a row of dried poppy heads, grey and rattling, each one pricked with a hundred tiny holes. Mags had gathered them every year since she was small, taking only the ones the frost had left standing in the hedge behind the byre. The carrier watched her turn one between finger and thumb and shake it by his ear. Inside, he heard the sound of sleep, a dry patter like rain on a shut lid.

Her father had kept a rule for the inn: a guest who came in out of the snow could stay until the thaw, but must give one thing to the seed bowl by the hearth. The carrier had nothing but a brass button and a letter for a widow at the mill. He gave the button. Mags tipped it in among the seeds, and the fire took the edge off the cold in the room.

When he woke, the blizzard had gone and the hedge was full of green shoots pushing through the drifts. On the sill a single poppy head had split open, and a red petal lay curled beside it, bright as a coal. Mags was already out in the yard with a spade. The widow's letter, he noticed, was gone from his coat pocket, and he never did find out whether she had taken it to the mill himself or left it in the bowl for the spring.