Colour botanical tattoo of blue foxgloves, a red poppy and pink gerberas with black outlines on the upper arm.

Foxglove, poppy and gerbera flowers on an arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a tall spike of blue foxgloves rising up the arm, with a red poppy with a dark centre on the left and pink gerbera daisies filling the lower right. The bell-shaped flowers have bold black outlines, soft blue shading and small dark speckles, with green leaves and stems linking the blooms. The colours are saturated and the composition follows the length of the limb against a plain white background.

Botanical Neo-trad Upper arm Poppy Flower Floral Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every June the fairies came down from the hill above Skerrow to try on their gloves, and every June Ada Penhallow went out before dawn to see which fingers had been left behind. Her grandmother had told her never to pick the bells, for a foxglove picked was a glove torn, and a torn glove sent a fairy hunting for the hand it belonged to. So Ada left the spires standing blue along the lane and counted them the way other girls counted coins.

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One year a red poppy came up in the barley, bold as a shout, and the old men said it was a sleep-flower that had got loose from the mainland. Then a ship from Madeira put in with crates of pink gerbera daisies, bright as boiled sweets, and the harbourmaster's wife set them in tubs outside the chapel. The flowers quarrelled all summer over the wall, poppy and gerbera jostling, while the foxgloves stood tall and said nothing.

In August a storm tore the roof off the net loft, and Ada, climbing up to save the gear, found a pair of tiny green gloves snagged on a nail, stitched from foxglove leaves. She carried them down the cliff path in her apron. At the top she met a small grey woman waiting, who held out her hands and asked for them back. Ada gave them over, and the woman laughed like wind through reeds and said, "You kept the bells standing. Ask me one thing."

Ada asked for the storms to stop coming to Skerrow. The woman shook her head. "That is the price of a fairy's glove," she said. "Ask for something that grows." So Ada asked that the poppies and daisies might stay in the lane, and they have stayed, and the bells still stand blue there every June when the fairies come to try their gloves on.