Black line tattoo of poppy flowers, seed pods and leafy stems wrapping around a person's upper arm, in a fine line botanical style.

Poppies and seed pods on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the outer upper arm with large poppy flowers, several rounded seed pods and a slender stem with small leaves and buds. The work is done in fine black linework with fine hatched lines on the petals and pods, and no shading or colour. The design runs diagonally down the arm, with more flower heads continuing towards the top of the shoulder and the elbow.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Poppy Flower Seed pod Leaves Stem Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had got into the seed store again, and Hettie Marl spent the first hour of light scraping rime off the jars with a butter knife. Her father had kept poppies on the north field for forty years, not for the oil, he always said, but because the heads rattled in October like a box of teeth and it made the crows nervous. This year the pods had split early in the cold, and the fine dark seed lay scattered on the sacking like grit from a mill.

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She found the old ledger under the seed bags, the one with the pressed stems glued to the pages. Her grandmother had drawn the pods in pencil beside each harvest, hatching the ridges so close the paper had gone shiny. Beside the drawing of a double bloom, the scrawled note read: Keep the seed for the one who comes back. Hettie had never known who that was meant to be. Her father had only ever laughed and said the poppies came back by themselves.

That afternoon a thin man walked up the lane from the station, carrying a canvas roll under his arm. He stopped at the gate and asked after the field, and whether anyone still grew the red and the white together. Hettie looked at the ledger in her hands, then at the frost blue on the stubble, and fetched the jar with the good seed in it.

He sowed the north field himself before the thaw, kneeling with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, pressing each grain into the wet ground with his thumb. When the first shoots came through in March, Hettie counted seven stems and did not tell him she had been counting every morning.