Black and grey fine line poppies with curling leaves and a bud tattooed across an upper arm and forearm.

Poppies and foliage across the arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Three poppy flowers with curling leaves and a bud are drawn in fine black outline down the upper arm and forearm. The petals have thin interior vein lines, and the centres are softly shaded with grey stippling. The clusters are spaced apart along the arm, with the lowest one wrapping around the forearm.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Forearm Poppy Flower Leaf Foliage Bud Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seed merchant's daughter, Ilse, had been sent to the market at Harrowgate with a cart of dried pods and a warning not to speak to the men who sold lamp oil after dark. She spoke to one anyway. His name was Tobiah Cray and his hands smelled of linseed. He asked what she carried, and she told him poppies, the kind her grandmother grew along the wall to keep the slugs off the beans.

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He said he had never seen a poppy that did not close at dusk. She said that was because they were tired, not because they were sleeping, and that if he wanted to know the difference he should come to the wall at harvest. He came. He stood among the stalks with his lantern while the moon came up over the chimney pots, and when the petals folded inward he swore they were folding about something he could not see.

By the next winter the old woman was dead and Ilse was keeping the wall herself. Cray came every night with the lamp oil he had promised to stop selling. Each morning there were fewer blooms and more buds, shut tight, their stems wound round the nearest leaves like a hand on a sleeve. Ilse began to suspect that the flowers were pulling in whatever they could hold, the way a cat pulls in a warm thing. She did not tell Cray. She only left the gate unlatched and waited for the moon to find the poppies first.