Close-up of a pink watercolour-style poppy tattoo with a long thin stem on a person's calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink watercolour poppy on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Colour · Photo

A single poppy in shades of pink, magenta and rose, with a dark centre and stamens, sits at the top of a long thin stem that runs down the leg. The petals use soft washes and blended edges, with splashes of orange and small dots of colour along the stem, giving a painted watercolour look. The tattoo fills the upper-middle of the frame against a blurred, warm brown background.

Botanical Calf Poppy Flower Stem Petal Leaf

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

Mrs Ada Brierley had the spoil heap fenced off before the poppies came, so the boys from Number Four could not kick their way across it on the way to the pit. Nobody had planted anything there in forty years. The slag was grey as cold porridge and smelled of sulphur after rain, but in June a single seed head pushed through a crack near the tip, and Ada went out every morning with her tea going cold on the step to check on it.

Keep reading

Her son Tom had gone down the shaft the week the colliery announced the last shift. He was not a man who looked at flowers. He came home black to the elbows and scrubbed at the sink with carbolic, and once he had asked her what the orange specks were on the stems of the poppies she had painted on the back of the tin tray for the church sale. She had said they were sparks off the furnace. He had laughed, and that was the most he had laughed all year.

The bloom opened on the Saturday. Its petals were the rose of a sugared plum at the rim and deeper at the heart, where the stamens stood up dark as coal dust in a bucket. Ada knelt on a folded sack with her good knee and cut one stalk with the kitchen scissors, and the sap ran milky down her wrist.

She took it to the pit gate on the Monday, where the men were gathering for the closing ceremony, and pinned it to Tom's coat by the lapel. Nobody said anything. The brass band struck up, the whistle went, and the wind off the heap lifted the loose petals and carried them, one by one, over the wire fence.