Coloured flash design of a brown hand holding red poppies, with a blue eye, a dotwork shaded grey orb and a red heart, in a neo-traditional style.

Poppies held in a hand with a heart

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of a hand rising from the bottom of the frame, holding a bunch of three red poppies and a closed bud. A blue eye with radiating lines sits on the palm, and a red heart with dotwork shading hangs below the fingers. Bold black outlines frame the poppies and leaves, with stippled shading around the hand on a plain white background.

Neo-trad Dotwork Poppy Hand Heart Eye Leaf Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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The van from Holland was late again, so I have been sitting on an upturned crate by the loading bay since half three, watching the lamps buzz over the fish men. Nobody buys poppies at this hour. The wholesalers say they are bad luck in a bucket, too full of their own sleep. I bought three stems anyway, with one bud still shut tight like a fist that has not decided yet, and I have them in the old jam jar on my knee.

You asked me last month why I keep drawing a hand with an eye in the palm. I said it was for the shop sign. That was a lie. My grandmother held a plumb line like that on the building sites in Bradford, a lead weight on a length of string, and she swore that if the hand stayed steady the weight would hang true. She used to say you cannot trust a thing until you have seen it from underneath. So I watch from underneath.

The sky is greying through the roof glass now. The bud has split a crack at the seam, red as a struck match, and it is the only thing in this shed that looks sure of itself. I am taking it to the Hendersons on Carr Lane and leaving it on their step with no note, because you never answered the one I wrote, and a flower does not need an address to know where it is going.