Black botanical tattoo of poppies, leaves and branches across a woman's shoulder and upper arm, in detailed linework.

Botanical poppy sprig across a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A fine black linework tattoo of poppy flowers, buds, feathery leaves and slender branches wraps over the shoulder and down towards the upper arm. The lines are dense and detailed, with shading in the petals and foliage giving depth, and the design curls around the shoulder cap. The photograph is taken against a plain pale blue wall, with the subject's shoulder and neck in soft natural light.

Botanical Shoulder Poppy Flower Leaves Branch Foliage Wildflower Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pods were still green when Mum pressed the paper bag into my hands, so we sat on the low wall above the reservoir and waited. She said you could not rush a poppy. You could only be there when it decided to open.

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Below us the hillside had gone the colour of old bread. The feathery leaves lay flat in the dust, and the slim branches that had carried the orange cups all spring were bent over like the wrists of tired dancers. Dad had been gone eleven months. The council had sent men with strimmers to clear the verge for the new cycle path, and Mum had walked out in her gardening gloves and stood in front of them until they went away again.

At four o'clock the nearest pod split with a dry tick, like a clock being wound. Then another. The seeds came out finer than sand and ran down my wrist, black and glossy and far more numerous than I had expected from something so light. Mum held the bag open and I tipped them in until my fingers ached. Keep the stalks, she said. Those are the bits that bloom if you put them in the ground by the gate.

We walked down with the bag tucked under my arm. At the gate she knelt in the hard earth with a trowel, and I understood that she had never been waiting for the seeds at all. She had been waiting for me to learn where the flowers would come back. The first red cup pushed through the gravel in May, the same week the cycle path got its tarmac, and nobody has had the heart to mow it since.