Black line tattoo of poppy and rose blooms within a mandala frame on the inner upper arm, with a pink wash behind the design.

Poppy and rose mandala on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large floral mandala covers the inner upper arm, centred on a poppy-like bloom with a rose-like flower above it, leaves below, and diamond-tipped dangling lines at the base. The linework is black and fine, with dotted borders and light shading on the petals and leaves. A soft pink wash fills the background behind the flowers, and the arm is photographed against a pale wall.

Botanical Geometric Dotwork Upper arm Poppy Rose Flower Leaves Mandala Dot Diamond Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Keep your hands off that tin, love, it's the last of the poppy seed and Mrs Pell would have my ears if a pinch went astray. Sit down by the stove. You've come for the winter the Halloran Brothers pitched on the common outside Fenny Stratford, and I'm the only one left breathing who saw it from the inside.

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The big top was never grand. Its hem had a border of painted poppies, red gone the colour of weak tea, and above the ring hung a circle of paper lanterns strung on wire with diamond-shaped tin shades that rattled when the wind came off the common. The boys called them dot lamps, because they threw little bright spots across the sawdust like rain that had decided to stay indoors. Every evening Eli Halloran climbed up with a pole to light them, and every evening he counted them out loud, as if one might wander off into the dark.

By the last week of February the crowds had gone to the pictures in town and we were playing to farm lads and a vicar's widow. The owner sold the elephant to a man from Leicester and told us the rose on the banner was for luck. Nobody believed him. On the final night the sky went pink through the canvas, the same wash they'd painted behind the flowers, and Mrs Pell stood in the middle of the ring with a fistful of poppies from her buckets and let the petals drop into the sawdust one at a time.

We struck the tent at dawn. I took the banner home rolled under my arm, and I still have it. Mrs Pell's petals are pressed between the pages of my mother's hymn book, and every one of them has gone the colour of that sky.