Realistic colour poppy and fine grey grass stems with a shaded bird on the upper arm and shoulder of a woman in a black top.

Poppy, grasses and bird on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large pink and red poppy sits on the shoulder and upper arm, with soft blended petals and dark centre detail. Thin grey grass stems with feathery seed heads sweep down the arm, and a shaded grey songbird perches on one stem near the elbow. The poppy is in colour while the foliage and bird are in black and grey, framed by a plain skin background and a black top.

Botanical Realism Upper arm Shoulder Poppy Flower Grass Foliage Stem Bird Songbird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your mother will tell you I should have sold the cart years ago, but I have never once driven to the Ludlow market without a sack of ryegrass seed on the back seat, and that is how the bird found me. It was February, the Tuesday before the frost fair, and I was counting out seed for a man from Bishop's Castle when I heard a small rattle at the tailboard.

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It was a plump brown bird with a grey cap, no bigger than my thumb, and it hopped along the lip of the sack as if it had paid for a place there. Every market day after that it came back, and every market day I let it take the seed heads that spilled. I told the young lad who helps me that it was bad business. He said the bird was a better stallholder than I was, because it never once asked for change.

Then in June my poppies came up along the verge by the lock, the ones I had scattered in a fit of nostalgia after your grandad died. Red as a shop awning, papery and rude. The bird sat on the wire above them all week, shaking grass heads loose, and I thought nothing of it until I walked the towpath on the Sunday and found the whole bank gone red, the stems bent with the weight of seed it had carried there one beak at a time.

Those poppies were mine, but the grass and the bird had made them into a field. Bring the boys down in August. Stand where the seed comes up to your elbow and you will hear the bird before you see it, and I promise it still will not be asking for change.