Watercolour-style red poppies on a woman's shoulder, upper arm and upper back, joined by a black heartbeat line with a red thread running through it.

Poppies and heartbeat line across shoulder and back

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The image shows the upper back, shoulder and upper arm of a woman, with three red and orange poppies in soft, blended shading. A black heartbeat trace runs across the shoulder and down the arm, with a thin red line weaving alongside it. The colour is concentrated in the flowers against plain skin, and the composition follows the curve of the shoulder.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Back Poppy Flower Heartbeat Ecg line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paper comes off the machine in a long fold, still warm, and you read it the way you read everyone's night, one spike at a time. Ward 9 is quiet after the two o'clock round. Someone has left a tin of shortbread by the sluice, and the lift hums somewhere below you like a note held too long.

Keep reading

Mrs Okonedo's trace is the one you keep returning to. Her line rises and falls steady as a railway timetable, but in the margin of the printout she has drawn a poppy in biro, then another, and beside the black ink a thread of red felt-tip that loops wherever the beats loop. Her grandson says she can no longer hold a pen. You do not tell him the drawing is what she spent the afternoon on.

At dawn you take the strips to the window at the end of the corridor. Sheffield is orange under the cloud, the roofs of Crookes lined up like the teeth of a comb. You lay the traces side by side on the sill and see what she saw: the black line of the heart, and the red line running alongside it, never quite touching, always close enough to be called company.

When the day shift arrives you give the handover and fold her strip into your pocket. At home you pin it above the kettle beside a poppy picked from the verge on the bus route, its petals already papery. The red has bled into the paper a little, the way ink does, and the two lines meet in only one place, where she pressed hardest.