Colour tattoo of orange poppies, green vines and a large decorative letter with swirling scrollwork on a person's limb, in a botanical style.

Poppies and a decorative letter on a limb

Botanical · Other · Colour · Photo

A large decorative letter with a flourished, looped outline is combined with two orange poppies and green vines that curl around it. The letter is shaded in brown with black outlines, while the poppies use orange tones with darker red shading and the stems and buds are green. The design fills the frame diagonally, with one poppy at the upper right and another at the lower left.

Botanical Lettering Other Poppy Letter Vine Bud Swirl Scroll Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the cold gets into old bones before it gets into stories. You want to know why the tall Z that opens the Book of Hours has a poppy growing out of its shoulder? Brother Ansgar would tell you the abbot was to blame, and he would be half right.

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Abbot Hildric forbade flowers in the margins. The eye, he said, must go to the Word and nowhere else. So Ansgar painted his poppies in the one corner of the garden where the wall had cracked and red seedlings came up each June, blown in from the barley fields beyond the river. He ground lead for the orange and stole a pinch of vermilion from the abbot's own box. He shaded the petals with the darkest red he could make, the colour of the altar cloth in Lent, and he let the stem wind through the loops of the letter like a thought that would not sit still.

At Compline the abbot came to inspect the work. He held the page to the candle for a long time while Ansgar waited for the scourge of words. Instead Hildric touched the green stem with one finger and asked, "Where does it go?" Ansgar admitted he did not know. He had only drawn it. The abbot said that was the first honest answer a scribe had given him in thirty years, and he left the page open on the desk.

In the morning the ink had dried, and a single poppy seed floated in the pot, black as a full stop. Ansgar fished it out with the tip of a quill and set it on the sill to dry. The abbot never mentioned flowers again. The vine, I am told, is still climbing that letter, and if you look at the old copy in the cold room you will see the leaves have crept off the vellum and onto the wall beside it.