Black ink botanical flash drawing of poppies and forget-me-not sprigs in a fine line style on aged cream paper.

Poppy and forget-me-not sprig drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A single sprig rises up the page, with an open poppy at the top, a second poppy bud lower down, and clusters of small forget-me-not flowers. The leaves and stems are drawn in fine, hatched black linework with some shading, and the sketch sits centred on a plain, slightly aged cream background. The image is monochrome, with no colour ink.

Botanical Poppy Forget-me-not Flower Bud Leaf Sprig Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mule would not go past the cairn, so I went on foot with my sketchbook buttoned inside my coat and the guide's rope knotted round my wrist. Hennersley had told me the pass at Vell Col was bare rock by August, that nothing grew there but lichen and the odd stubborn saxifrage. He had never climbed it himself, which I learned only after we reached the top.

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Below the last snowfield the scree gave way to a shelf of thin grass, and there, in a crack of wet slate, a poppy stood open as wide as my palm. Its petals were creased like tissue that had been folded and ironed flat. Beside it, crowding the stone, the forget-me-nots had made a little blue weather of their own. I knelt and drew them with the stub of pencil I kept for pressed specimens, hatching the shadows under each petal the way my father had taught me, one line leaning into the next until the paper went dark.

The guide, Anselm, watched me work and said nothing until the light began to turn. Then he told me his sister had walked this pass in 1911 with a bunch of those same blue flowers pinned to her collar, and that she had never come down. He did not ask me to stop. He only asked whether I would leave a sprig for her, and I found I had already broken one free.

I pressed it between the pages of the sketchbook that night, in a hut that smelled of wet wool and paraffin. In the morning the poppy had folded its petals shut against the cold, and the forget-me-nots had kept their colour, or so I told myself. I carried the book down the far side of the mountain, and every mile I felt it knocking against my ribs.