Colour botanical tattoo of orange poppies and lavender sprigs with green leaves on the outer forearm, shown with the arm extended.

Poppies and lavender on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bouquet of orange poppies and purple lavender sprigs with green leaves rises up the forearm, with the stems tapering downwards. The outlines are dark and fairly fine, with soft colour washes in the petals and layered greens in the foliage. The bouquet is centred on the forearm against a blurred grey background, and the hand and forearm are shown in natural light.

Botanical Forearm Poppy Lavender Flower Leaves Bouquet Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lavender had gone over by the time Nell Tanner tied the last of it to the cabin hatch, and the poppies along the towpath below Bradley Lock were already shedding their petals into the wind. She counted the sprigs out loud the way her father had taught her: one for the lock keeper's hut, one for the coal boat that never came back through, one for herself. Beneath the planks the water rose in the chamber with a sound like someone breathing through their teeth.

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Her father had kept the *Bramble* for thirty-one years and never once cut a flower from the verge. Leave them to the bees, he used to say, then he'd lean over the gate with a rake and haul out a fortnight's worth of bottles and weed for the council. Nell had no bees and no patience for the council. What she had was a tin of seed packets, a pencil stub, and a list written on the back of a gas bill that she kept folding and unfolding in her coat pocket.

A boy from the next moorings came down the path with a spaniel on a length of washing line and asked if she was the new lock keeper. She said she was his daughter, which was true enough to be going on with, and when he asked what the flowers were for she pulled a poppy from the bunch and gave it to him. He tucked it behind his ear, the papery head bobbing, and ran off towards the pub with the dog barking at his heels.

She hung the bunch upside down from the hatch, the orange heads gone thin as tissue and the lavender turned the colour of old pewter. The boat smelt of a summer that had not quite finished with them, and Nell lay in the bunk with the window open and listened to the gate levers settle.