Red poppies with dark centres and grey lily of the valley sprigs in a botanical tattoo on a forearm, shown in two photographs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Poppies and lily of the valley on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two photographs show a forearm tattoo of red poppies with dark centres, alongside grey lily of the valley sprigs and green-grey leaves. The poppies use red and orange ink with soft shading and fine detail on the stamens, while the lilies and foliage are shaded in grey. The left image shows the full arm against a dark background, and the right image is a closer view of the same design.

Botanical Forearm Poppy Flower Leaves Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Harrowden would cut the poppies that grew along the top of the churchyard wall. The vicar asked twice, and the sexton once, holding a scythe he had clearly decided not to use. They grew as red as cooked meat in the July sun, and every May the lily of the valley came up beneath them, white bells ringing soft on their stalks, as though the flowers had agreed between themselves to share the wall.

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Ada Penrose went up there most evenings after her husband had gone to bed, a basket on her arm and her apron full of pockets. She snapped the poppy heads at the neck and left the petals to fall, and she bent for the lilies with her knees cracking like kindling. Her boy had gone under the mill race the winter before, and since then she had not slept more than an hour together. She boiled the heads down in the copper, strained the brown liquor through muslin, and sweetened it with honey from the hives at the bottom of the lane.

The first night it worked, she slept until noon and woke with her mouth dry and the church bell already tolling for the funeral of someone else. The second night she dreamed of her boy on the bank, looking back at her over his shoulder as if he had only stepped out to fetch something. She drank it anyway. By the third week she could not tell the dreams from the mornings, and the vicar's wife had begun to set a place for her at the Sunday table, which was kind and which she resented.

On the last evening of May she stopped at the wall with the basket empty. The lilies had opened all at once, thick under the poppies, and the bells were moving though there was no wind. She sat down in the grass, put the cup down beside her, and did not drink it. The lilies would come back next spring whether anyone was grieving under them or not, and she found that she could stand that.