Botanical tattoo on a forearm of red poppies and tall grass stems in black linework with soft red and green washes, plus a small purple dot.

Poppies and grasses on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows several red poppies with open petals and dark centres, set among thin black stems and feathery grass that rise up the forearm and fade out near the wrist. The black linework is loose and sketched, and the red, green and touches of purple are applied as soft, watercolour-like washes. The design fills the forearm diagonally, with the densest colour around the poppies and the grass fading towards the top edge.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Poppy Grass Wildflower Stem Flower Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Margrave sent for me the week the barley came in early, which is how I knew something was wrong with the fields. In Oster Vale we do not cut the poppies at the edges of the crop. We leave them standing and count them, and a count that comes up short means famine or debt, sometimes both. I was the only painter left in the district who could draw a poppy from memory, so the steward gave me a brush, three pots of madder, a green ground and a sheet of rag paper, and sent me out along the ditch road.

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The grass was the hard part. Every stem had to be a single quick line of ink, because my master used to say a stem drawn twice is a stem someone has argued over. I worked from first light to second, laying the washes on wet so the red spread into the paper like a bruise through linen. Where I put on too much madder the petals pooled and darkened at the rims, and I left them alone, since a poppy in a hurry is still a poppy. A boy from the mill brought me bread at noon and asked what I was counting. I told him the flowers. He laughed and said nobody counts flowers except the dead.

When the light went, the steward came with a lantern and stood a long time before the sheet I had pinned to the chapel wall. He studied the stems fading out towards the bottom edge, where I had let the green run thin, and then the single violet dot near the top, a drop from the blue pot that had jumped the rim when my hand shook. "That one," he said, tapping the glass, "they will remember. The field is whole. Somebody has to draw the eye up off the ground." He paid me in salt and sent me home.

I walked back down the ditch road in the dark. At the bend I looked round, and the chapel wall was the only colour left in the valley, a small red fire held up against the black hills, and I understood for the first time that the count had never been of flowers.