Black and grey poppy tattoo with stems and a bud running down a woman's upper arm, with a small skull and trumpet below, in a botanical and traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Poppies with skull and trumpet on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two open poppy heads on long, thin, hairy stems, with a closed bud at the lower left. A small skull and a trumpet sit beside the lower stem. The poppies use fine, sketchy black linework with grey shading, and there is a little red detail in the skull, against a plain brick wall background.

Botanical Traditional Upper arm Poppy Bud Stem Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tobias Rudd kept the band's trumpet on a nail above the pit-head door, and every morning before the cage went down he took it off the nail and looked at it, the way other men looked at the sky. The band had been nine men once. Now it was four, and one of those was his son Eli, who played the cornet badly and would not be told.

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The poppies came up that spring on the slag heap behind the chapel, where nothing else would grow. Nobody planted them. The women said the seed had come in on the coal dust from over the water. The men said it had come up out of the ground where the dead were, which was the kind of thing men said after too long underground. Eli picked a bunch for his mother and she put them in a jug on the windowsill, and by noon the petals lay on the table like scraps of paper.

On the night of the roof fall, the trumpet was the only thing that carried. Tobias stood at the top of the shaft with it under his arm and blew the call that meant nobody was to come near the lift. He blew until his lips split, and the sound went down the valley and came back off the hills. Eli was in the seam with the others. They came up one at a time, and Eli came last, with his hand on a stranger's shoulder and his face black to the eyes.

Next spring the slag heap was red again. Tobias climbed up with the trumpet and blew one plain note into the morning. The buds on the stalks, shut tight all winter, loosened one by one, as though they had heard their own names called.