Colour neo-traditional tattoo of red and purple poppies, a peach peony and wheat on the thigh, with green leaves and orange scrollwork.

Poppies and peony on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A cluster of flowers includes a large red poppy, a pale peach peony, a dark purple bloom, poppy buds, wheat ears and green leaves. Bold outlines and saturated colour are combined with soft shading on the petals and leaves. The arrangement sweeps diagonally up the thigh, with orange scrolls curling beneath the peony.

Neo-trad Botanical Thigh Poppy Peony Wheat Flower Leaf Bud Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud Carrow went out to the far field before the light was up, because the frost had come early and her husband had always said frost was the field asking for something. She had a sack over one shoulder and a bad knee that told her every step. The wheat she had left standing was bowed and grey, and at the hedge the poppies had gone to pods, green heads like knuckles, each one holding its black seed as if it had been trusted with a secret.

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She knelt by the ditch and started picking. The old tale in that parish said the field took one thing from a household each winter and gave back in spring whatever it had been owed. Her husband had gone in the autumn. Her son had gone to the city. She had only the field, and the peony by the back step, which had flowered out of season every year since the funeral, pale as a candle and heavy as a dinner plate.

She picked poppy heads until her fingers ached and the sack was half full. Then, at the bottom of the ditch, she found a single red bloom, late and stubborn, its petals folded like a letter nobody had read. She tucked it inside her coat, against her ribs, where it stayed warm.

In spring the peony opened, and in the wet ground of the far field the wheat came up in a line as straight as a ruled page, with the poppies among it, red as a struck match. Maud said nothing about it to anyone. She simply went out each morning and counted the ears, and found there was always one more than the day before.