Colour tattoo of orange California poppies with green leaves and a banner with partly legible lettering, on the outer forearm.

Orange poppies and banner on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows several orange poppies with yellow centres and green leaves, with a small bud near the bottom. A pale banner runs across the lower part of the design with dark lettering, partly visible. The flowers use soft, blended shading in orange and yellow, and the composition wraps diagonally around the arm.

Botanical Neo-trad Forearm Poppy Flower Leaves Banner Lettering Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the goat, she thinks the chair is hers. You want the poppy story? Then hush. Out on the western side of Harrow Skerry the wind comes off the Atlantic hard enough to bend the grass flat, and still the orange poppies come up every spring, bright as spilt marmalade on the cliff.

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There was a boy called Tomas Quill who went grey in the face the winter his father's boat was sold to men from the mainland. He walked the cliff path each morning with his hands jammed in his pockets and would not look at the water. His aunt Marit kept the shop by the slipway, and she was not one for soft words. She simply knotted a strip of old sailcloth to the gate, painted across it in her square capitals, I'M NOT SAD ANYMORE, and said, "Read that every time you pass, and mean it when you reach the end."

He scoffed. He read it anyway, because the letters were big enough to trip over. By the end of April the bank below the gate had filled with poppies, a whole tumble of them, orange as the lamp in the Skerry light, with yellow hearts as if someone had dropped sunlight into each one. Tomas took to stopping there. He counted the buds. He argued with the gulls about who had planted them.

One morning in May he came down the path without his hands in his pockets. He picked the smallest bud, the one still folded tight at the bottom, and put it in Marit's palm. "That one's yours," she said, "it'll open when it's ready." It did. And that is why, when the wind comes in off the sea, you will still find a few flowers on the cliff that nobody planted, and nobody will tell you who did.