Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a grey lantern with a red glow and an orange poppy with green leaves on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lantern and poppy on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large lantern sits at the centre of the forearm, with a red-orange glow inside its glass and a grey metal body outlined in bold black lines. A red-orange poppy fills the lower part of the design, with a rosebud and green leaves framing the lantern on both sides. The shading is soft and smooth, with bright colour dominating against the dark sleeve at the edge of the frame.

Neo-trad Botanical Forearm Lantern Poppy Rose Rosebud Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas had the lamps because the second mate said nobody else would climb into the forepeak with a wick and a can of paraffin. Eleven weeks out of Liverpool, the Ellen Varley rolled through a grey swell, and the passage lantern had gone dark twice since midnight.

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He lifted it from its hook and turned it in the stairwell's yellow light. The glass was smoked on the lee side, and the flame inside its wire cage had shrunk to a bead. He unscrewed the burner, wiped the collar with a rag that smelt of the galley, and thought of the pressed poppy his sister had sent in a letter, folded inside an empty seed packet. Its petals had gone the colour of old wine. She wrote that the field behind the chapel at Hessle was full of them, and that she walked through it every evening so he would have someone's footsteps in his head.

A wave hit the bow and the stairwell tilted. He braced a shoulder against the bulkhead and held the lamp away from his coat. Feet clattered down the ladder. The captain stood there with his collar up and asked whether the light was lit. "Not yet, sir," Tomas said, filled the reservoir with a steady hand, shook the wick straight, and struck the match inside his cupped palms. The flame took. The glow spread across the riveted steel, orange and even, and the captain looked at it for a long while before saying that from the bridge it was the only warm thing on the whole ship.

Tomas hooked the lamp back in place and watched the light settle. He took out his sister's letter, unfolded the seed packet, and looked at the poppy in the dim orange. Then he folded it back along the same creases, put it in his breast pocket, and went up on deck to see what the sea was doing.