Upper arm tattoo of red poppies and a white heart in black dotwork shading, with a line of script beneath the heart.

Poppies and heart with dotwork on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a man's upper arm and shoulder showing a tattoo of outlined red poppies on thin stems, with a large unfilled heart in the centre. The heart sits on a black halftone dot pattern, and a line of script runs along the bottom, partly visible. Black linework is combined with soft red wash on the flowers, and the composition wraps from the shoulder down the outer arm.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Poppy Flower Heart Dot Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lorry came through the Halluin crossing at ten past four with its seal already cut, and the driver, a boy with a sunburnt neck, swore on his mother that he hadn't touched it. I believed him about as far as the barrier. My job on that shift was to decide who was lying, and nine times out of ten the answer was everybody, so I pulled the tarpaulin back myself.

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Under the crates of tinned peaches sat a shoebox tied with garden twine. Inside was a bundle of letters, the paper gone the colour of weak tea, each one with a poppy pressed flat between the pages. The top envelope had been postmarked in Dunkirk in 1951 and addressed to a farm outside Armentières. Every letter ended with the same pencilled words, smudged where someone had pressed too hard: je t'aime, Maman. Nobody had ever opened the box, or at least nobody had ever been meant to.

Regulations said I should log it as undeclared correspondence and send it to a depot in Lille, where it would sit under a lamp for six months and then be burned. I did log it. Then at half past six, when my relief arrived, I carried the box across the road myself, past the wind turbine and the dog that never barked, to a house with a blue shutter hanging from one hinge.

The woman who answered was perhaps eighty, and she didn't ask who I was. She saw the twine, touched the knot with one finger, and said the farm had been sold in the sixties. Then she went to the windowsill, where a jam jar held a fistful of dried poppies, and took down a paper heart from the shelf above. "He always came back for the flowers," she said, and she held the box against her coat as if it might still be warm.