Black and grey botanical tattoo of two poppy-like flowers and leaves on the side of the ribs, with a hand holding the skin above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical flower sprig on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two open, poppy-like flowers sit at the top of a slender stem that trails leaves diagonally down to the lower right. The linework uses fine hatching and stippled shading to give the petals and foliage depth and volume. Rendered entirely in black and grey, the design wraps across the side of the torso while a hand grips the skin at the upper right.

Botanical Ribs Flower Poppy Leaves Stem Branch Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The poppies came up in the Bramley rows the summer after the hard frost, which my father said meant nothing except poor soil. I was twelve and had been sent out with a hoe and a bucket to clear the bindweed from under the trees. It was late August, the fruit hung heavy, and the wasps were drunk on the windfalls in the long grass.

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Mrs Oduya from the cottage at the end of the lane came up every evening with a flask of tea and a pair of secateurs she never let anyone else touch. She knew the names of everything. She crouched by the poppy stems, pinched a leaf between finger and thumb, and said the foliage went the colour of old pewter once the light dropped. She showed me how to cut a sprig without bruising the stem, then tied it to a stake with green thread and told me a sprig brought into a house keeps the house honest, though she didn't say what it kept honest.

On the third night the wind got up from the west. In the morning the two open heads lay flat in the grass, their petals scattered like wet paper. I ran to tell her and found the gate standing open, the cottage shut up, and a note weighted with a stone on the kitchen table. Keep the sprig. Hang it where the light comes in.

I hung it in the packing shed above the window, where it dried slowly and kept its shape. Years later, when the Bramleys were sold and the trees grubbed out, the poppies still came up in the same gap by the gate, grey-green under the frost, and I stood there with the stake in my hand and let them be.