Black ink stippled drawing of two poppies and fern fronds on a stem, shown as a botanical tattoo design sketch on cream paper.

Poppies and fern sprig line drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two open poppy flowers on curving stems with a pair of feathery fern fronds, one rising beside the flowers and one at the lower right. The linework is fine and the petals and centres are built up with dense stippling and short hatching, with no solid colour. The design is set on a cream paper background, photographed at an angle against a patterned grey-blue surface.

Botanical Dotwork Poppy Flower Fern Leaves Stem Stippling

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nan, the frost hasn't lifted off the north side of the pass since Tuesday, and the mules have started refusing the upper track without someone walking ahead with a lantern. Tomcat says it's the wind that spooks them, but I think they just know what the weather is about to do. I have taken over the lantern duty, mostly because nobody else wanted the cold hands and the company of a donkey that bites.

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Yesterday I found poppies growing out of a crack in the scree below the hut, two of them, open as if they had been waiting all winter to be looked at. I know poppies don't belong up at this height, but there they were, with their papery petals gone the colour of old lace and their middles full of dark dots, like someone had gone over them with the finest pen in the world. I sat down on a rock and drew them in the back of the ledger while the kettle took its time. The ferns growing alongside were feathery and stubborn, the sort that clings on wherever there's a bit of damp, and I drew those too, because you once told me you can tell a lot about a place by what is willing to grow in it.

I'm sending you the page with this letter. Don't let Mam see the bit where I've scribbled over the wrong stem. The mules are stamping, so I must go and find the lantern. Tell Dad the flowers were still open when I came back past them, and that they don't seem to mind the cold at all.

Your loving granddaughter, Ines