Black and grey fine line poppy flower tattoo with a thin stem and small leaves on the side of a ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Poppy flower on the side ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a single open flower with layered, ruffled petals and a dark centre, drawn on a thin curved stem with two small leaf sprigs. The linework is fine and even, with soft stippled shading across the petals and centre. Only black ink and grey tones are used, set against pale skin with a white cloth draped beside the design.

Botanical Fine line Ribs Flower Poppy Stem Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The school hall still smelled of floor polish and the same orange squash we drank at our leavers' do, and for the first hour I kept my back to the urn so I wouldn't have to look at Dawn Pickering. We had not spoken since the summer we were sixteen, when she borrowed my sketchbook on the 47 bus to Maidstone and returned it nine days later with the ticket still tucked inside the cover. I had assumed she'd forgotten. I had assumed a lot of things about Dawn, most of them unkind.

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She found me by the raffle table eventually, holding two paper cups and a biscuit wrapped in a napkin. 'You never finished it,' she said, and handed me the sketchbook from a carrier bag. I turned to the page with the poppy. Mr Abbott had called it fussy, all those tiny hatched lines in the petals, and I had given up after the stem. Someone had gone back over it. The petals were stippled with dots, dense at the base and thinning towards the ruffled edges, and the dark centre had been worked until it looked like a hole you could fall into. 'I used to sit in the bus shelter drawing it while you were at practice,' she said. 'It seemed a shame to let it wilt.'

I asked why she'd kept the book nine days. She shrugged and said the thing about a drawing is that it stays put, which is more than anyone could say for us that year. Then she laughed and told me I could have the biscuit. Out in the car park later, I sat with the book open on my knee under the sodium lamp, counting the dots in the petals, lost count somewhere past two hundred, and started again.