Black and grey botanical tattoo of a large poppy, a daisy-like flower and leaves across a shoulder and upper back, drawn in bold outline.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Poppy and daisy across a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large poppy with layered petals and a second daisy-like bloom sit together with broad leaves spreading across the shoulder and upper back. The work is mostly bold black outline with little shading, with some grey texture in the flower centres and petal folds. The flowers fill the frame on a softly lit, out-of-focus background.

Botanical Shoulder Back Poppy Daisy Flower Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The poppies came up on the cutting the spring after the line reopened, which Mr Abbott said was impossible, since nothing grew on that clay. I was nine and knew better than to argue with a signalman who carried a pocket watch and had no patience for nonsense.

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Every morning I walked the platform from the ticket office to the far barrier with a tin of water, watering the seed boxes my mother had set along the waiting room window. The daisies were hers, stubborn white things she had carried over from the allotment in a pram. She said they would outlast the trains. The poppies belonged to nobody. They simply arrived, great crumpled sheets of red on the bank, and the wind off the tracks tore their petals loose and left them lying on the ballast like spilt coins.

The summer the goods yard flooded, the company sent a man with a clipboard to clear the embankment. He stood on the footbridge a long while looking at the flowers before he wrote anything down. Then he asked me which bloom was which. I told him the daisy was my mother's and the poppy belonged to the line, because it had come up where the old rails had been torn out, and nobody had asked it to.

He closed his clipboard and left the embankment as it was. When the next train came through, the petals lifted off the bank and chased it down the valley, and I waved at the carriage windows until the last of them was gone.