Realistic poppy flowers with green centres and two arrows with red fletching, tattooed on the upper chest in soft pink, green, and red tones.

Poppies and arrows on the upper chest

Botanical · Chest · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two pale pink poppies with green centres, overlapping and shaded softly to suggest petal texture. Three arrows with striped shafts and red feathered fletching cross behind and through the flowers. The colour is soft and muted, with the pinks and greens balanced by small touches of red on the arrow tips, and the design sits centrally on the upper chest.

Botanical Realism Chest Poppy Flower Arrow Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The road out of Calvary Wells had been gravel for forty miles, and by the time the sun cleared the ridge you had stopped counting the washouts. The pickup's tailgate rattled with every rut. On the seat beside you, your brother's bow case slid back and forth at each bend, and you kept one hand on it so the arrows inside would not knock together and split their shafts.

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At the last fuel stop, Mrs Abernathy had pressed a paper seed envelope into your palm. She grew poppies behind the chapel, the pale pink kind nobody else in the county could coax into bloom. "Scatter them where the ground's been turned," she said. "They'll come up wherever they're not wanted." You asked what they were good for. She shrugged. "Looking at, mostly," she said, and laughed until she coughed.

Past the dry wash, a grader had cut the road fresh and left a long bare verge of pale dirt. Your brother had made the arrows for the autumn shoot in Redhollow, striped shafts and red feathers he had dyed himself, and he had told you not to let them ride loose. You pulled over anyway. The wind came down off the mesa and lifted the envelope's flap, and you thought of his workbench, the shavings on the floor, and how he never once fired a finished arrow at anything living.

You tore the envelope and walked the verge, letting the seeds fall in a loose line as the heat rose off the stones. Nothing would show for weeks. Still, you turned back once to the truck, where the bow case sat in the window with its feathers catching the light like struck matches, and you decided the seeds could wait for the rain.