Black outline drawing of several poppies on tall slender stems with seed pods, a fine line botanical design shown on a plain white background.

Poppies and seed pods line drawing

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of several poppy flowers on long, slender stems, with seed pods of varying sizes between them. The linework is a single even weight with no shading, and the petals have soft, wavy edges. The design is shown on a plain white background with no colour fill.

Fine line Botanical Poppy Flower Seed pod Stem Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spoil tip above Hollin Row has gone red again, and you climb through the bracken with an empty jam jar knocking against your hip. Your mother was clear: the seed heads must be dry before the first frost, or there will be no poppies in the back yard next summer. You stop where the path bends and look down at the pit head, its wheel still since the spring, the chimney pale against a sky the colour of wet slate.

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Up here the poppies grow out of the grey shale as if someone had told them it was their job. The stems are thin and far too long for the flowers they carry, and the petals crumple in the wind like tissue paper forgotten in a coat pocket. Each one lasts a single day, so you leave them be. You walk among the drying pods instead, the ones with the little hats on top, and snap them off close to the stem. When you shake one by your ear, the seed inside rattles like sand in a tin.

A man from the council is waiting by the gate with a clipboard and a van that smells of diesel. He tells you the tip is to be levelled and grassed over in March, and that the poppies will be gone by spring. You ask whether they will come back. He looks up at the red, then at you, and says they always come back, that's the trouble with them. Then he returns to his van and leaves you with the wind and the jar.

You fill the jar to the neck before you go home, pods and loose seed and one bent petal you could not bring yourself to leave. That night you sow the seed in the yard behind the terrace, pressing it into the thin soil beside the coal bunker where the light comes last. By April there will be a red edge to that bunker, and nobody from the council will be able to tell you why.