Colourful vintage-style poppy bouquet tattoo with green leaves and buds, placed on a woman's upper arm near the shoulder.

Poppy bouquet tattoo on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A bouquet of red, pink and orange poppies with green leaves and closed buds rises diagonally from the upper arm towards the shoulder. The flowers are rendered with soft shading and detailed petal veining in the manner of a vintage botanical illustration. The warm, multicoloured palette sits against a pale background and a white lace top, with the subject shown from behind.

Botanical Upper arm Poppy Flower Bouquet Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Dorota kept the crossing at the stone bridge, where the river marked a line that two kingdoms had long stopped agreeing about. She charged one copper a cart and asked no questions, which suited the smugglers and the pedlars alike. One autumn a boy came over with a cart heaped under sacking, and when the guard lifted a corner with his stick, red and pink blossoms spilled out, their green stems tied together with wire.

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"Poppies," the guard said.

"Bridal flowers," said the boy. "My sister marries on the far bank. The red are for her, and the pale ones are for her mother, who is dead."

Dorota laughed, because nobody in her life had told her a lie so clever. She waved him through. Each stem had been pressed in a book of gummed paper, the petals flattened and painted by hand, the leaves pinned with tiny brass nails, so the whole cart was a meadow that would never drop a seed or wilt in the sun.

In the spring a woman crossed with a bouquet on her shoulder, and the guard swore afterwards that every closed bud had opened as she passed the toll. Dorota did not believe him. She did notice that her copper was warm in her palm, that the river had gone still, and that the wheel ruts from the boy's cart still ran into the mud on the far bank, though no cart had made them since the autumn.