Close-up of a fine line botanical tattoo of three poppies in red and blue outline, running from the shoulder down the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Poppies in red and blue line on upper arm

Fine line · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows three poppies on a single stem line, with seed heads and buds, drawn in thin outlines. Each outline is doubled with a slight red and blue offset, giving a layered, misregistered look against the skin. The design runs from the shoulder down the upper arm, with an orange garment and a blurred background at the edges of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Poppy Flower Seed head Bud Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The register marks were the first thing Dilys noticed wrong, two tiny crosshairs that refused to sit on top of each other however she turned the screw on the plate bed. Red sat a hair left of blue. Mr Okonedo, who had run the litho press at Padgett and Sons for thirty-one years, said that was simply how paper behaved in a damp August, and told her to pull another dozen proofs before the seed catalogue went down to the binder.

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She pulled them. The poppies on the cover were meant to be one clean line in one ink, but every stroke came off the roller twice, once in cobalt and once in a rusty red, the second ghosting a little to the side like a bird's shadow on a windowpane. By the fortieth sheet she had stopped swearing at it and started looking. Three flowers on a single stem, a bud hanging off the side, a seed head tipped open like a pepper pot. The misregistration made them seem to lean in towards each other, as if they were deciding something.

On the last Friday the old man stood at the bench with his tea going cold and watched a clean sheet slide off the press. He took a pencil, drew a second line beneath the first, slightly apart, and grunted that it looked like a mistake that had learnt some manners. Then he tore the spoiled sheets into quarters for the scrap bin and went home without saying anything more about it.

Dilys kept the worst of the proofs folded in her coat pocket. Years later, in a flat in Leeds, she held one up to the window and the red and blue came apart into two flowers, one for each eye, and she still could not make them sit still.