Black and grey botanical tattoo of poppies and fern fronds covering a woman's upper arm and shoulder.

Poppies and fern on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large botanical design of poppy flowers and fern fronds wraps over the shoulder and down the upper arm. The work is done in dark linework with heavier dark fills in the flower centres and some shading on the petals. The image is in warm tones, with the model's lower face and a dark floral dress in the frame beside the arm.

Botanical Fine line Upper arm Shoulder Poppy Flower Fern Leaves Floral

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

The order book at Hollis and Daughters had forty-one pages of poppies by the time Mr Hollis came down with his chest, and nobody in the office could say who had asked for so many. I took the pencil case home the Friday after the funeral and sat up with the drawings under the lamp. Every sheet showed the same thing, a cup of papery petals opened over a fern frond, the stems drawn in quick hard strokes that stopped where the paper ran out.

Keep reading

The customer's name was written in a neat clerical hand: a Mrs E. Carrow, Willow Lane, care of the post office at Ightham. I wrote to her twice. The letters came back unopened, the second with a note in the postman's pencil saying the house had been let to a family from Chatham who had no use for seed. I went out on the bus on the first dry Saturday in June, carrying a tin of Shirley poppy seed and the forty-one sheets rolled in brown paper.

Willow Lane ran out into a field where the poppies stood as high as my waist, red where the sun caught them and nearly black in the shade of the hedge. At the gate a fern had grown up through a rusted hinge. I stood there a long while with the drawings in my hands, and I understood that the petals were hers, that she had walked this field every morning for years and got every stroke right without a single rubbing out.

I scattered the seed the way Mr Hollis taught me, thin and by hand, and left the tin on the gatepost. When I came back in July the poppies had gone to seed and the fern had spread across the path. Pressed inside the back cover of the order book is one bloom I took home, its black heart faded to the colour of ink, with a slip of paper beside it that reads only: sow again.