Red and black hibiscus and poppy flowers with sketchy linework and small insects, covering an upper arm and part of the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hibiscus and poppy flowers on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large hibiscus bloom in black shading sits at the centre, surrounded by red poppy-like flowers and loose black outlines. Soft red wash and grey shading give the petals a painterly, watercolour-like finish, while thin sketchy lines frame the edges. The design wraps across the upper arm and up towards the shoulder, with a few insect shapes drawn in outline near the lower part.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Hibiscus Poppy Flower Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on that upturned crate, and mind the gull, he has his eye on your chips. You want to know about the hibiscus woman, the one who painted the red flowers on the harbour wall. Everyone in Brackwater knows the wall, but few know the bargain behind it, so I will tell it once and you can carry it off.

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Thirty summers back there was a sailmaker's girl called Nell Ashdown who could not sit still in a pew. Her father had sewn canvas for the herring boats for forty years, and she had his needle in her fist before she had her letters. The day the Marigold went down off the Scarr, the fishermen brought her a torn spinnaker that had come ashore with nothing else in it. She sat with it three nights, and on the fourth morning there were poppies stitched through the rips, red as lamplight on wet slate, so the sail looked like it was bleeding into the wind.

The harbourmaster, Tobias Crane, bought the cloth for a shilling and hung it in the chandlery window, and that is where the trouble started. The visitors came in their hundreds, every one wanting a bloom of their own. Nell said no. Flowers were not for selling, she said, only for keeping. So she painted a single black hibiscus on the sea wall below the church, with a petal for every boat that had not come home. The moths gathered round it every dusk, and some folk swear they were the drowned men's breath. I say they were only moths, but moths know where the light is.

When the council whitewashed the wall that spring, the black bloom would not come off, and the red poppies bled up through the lime like they had something to say. Nell never took a commission again. Next morning a red poppy had opened on the step where the gull sits, and that gull, I swear, has never once eaten from a stranger's hand. Now finish your chips and go and look at the wall, but do not touch it.