Black line drawing of the state of California filled with poppies, lupine stalks and fern-like leaves, drawn as a fine line tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

California outline with poppies and lupine

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing of the outline of California with three large poppy flowers, two lupine flower spikes and feathery leaves clustered across the southern and central part of the state. The linework is clean and fine with small hatched marks at the flower centres and no shading or fill. The image is black and white with a plain white background and no body is shown.

Fine line Botanical State outline Poppy Flower Leaves Map

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flume ran past Ada's window all winter, carrying grey water from the diggings down to the sluice boxes below Cinder Bar, and by March the slope behind the cabins had turned orange with poppies. Her father called them weeds. He said the same of the blue lupine that crowded the path to the assay office, but he would stop the mule to pick a stem for her mother on a Sunday and tuck it into his hatband without a word about it.

Keep reading

Ada wanted to sell the seed. A seedsman had come up on the stage from Sacramento with a cart of tins and a sign that said California's Own, and he had paid a dollar for a handful of dried heads from the Widow Pruett's fence. Ada had a whole biscuit tin of them, labelled in pencil and kept under her bed. Her father said gold did not grow, and a girl could not eat poppies, and she should let the hillside be.

In April the shaft at the north claim gave way with four men below. Ada's father was one of the two who walked out again, grey from crown to boot, and he sat down on the slope above the spoil heap and would not go in to supper. When her mother finally went out to him, Ada followed and saw the tin in his coat pocket, the lid prised open and a little pile of seed spilled onto the dust beside him.

By midsummer the spoil heap that had nearly buried them was furred with orange at its edges, and the lupine stood blue in every crack where the water ran off. Her father never said he had been wrong. He just kept the tin on the windowsill, and every evening he tipped a pinch of seed from it into his palm and walked up the hill to scatter it.