Full back tattoo of red poppies, pink flowers, black lace and a dragon head in mixed botanical and Japanese style across the upper and lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Poppy, lace and dragon back piece

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows red poppies and pink blossoms layered over a black lace pattern, with a grey serpentine form curling across the shoulder. A dragon or serpent head with a red eye sits at the lower back, shaded in greys with fine detail on its scales and mane. Colour is used for the flowers, while the lace, serpent and dragon are rendered in black and grey, and the design wraps across the whole back.

Botanical Japanese Back Poppy Flower Blossom Lace Dragon Serpent Feather Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The nets came up empty again on the Tuesday, and Dad said it was the serpent, the same as he'd said about the lobsters and the cod. Nobody on Skerra Quay laughed at him any more. We just looked at the black water past the breakwater and hauled harder, cursing the cold out of our knuckles.

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Gran had sat by the window with her bobbins for sixty years, clicking out lace for the church and for anyone who paid, and she swore the thing under the bay had a crest like a poppy field and a tail that combed the seabed. Every sail she mended got a red thread stitched into the hem, so the sea would know whose boat it was. She said the sea was a great deal less stupid than fishermen.

In October the fog lifted at first light and I went out alone in the skiff, because Dad's hands had gone bad and Tomas had taken the bus to Inverness. The water was flat as pewter. Then something rose beside the hull, grey and ridged, its scales worked over in patterns as fine as Gran's pillow work, and an eye opened on the head as red as a poppy at midsummer. It looked at me the way Gran looked at a dropped stitch. Then it dived, and the net came up full of cod, every one of them with a red thread knotted through its gill.

I came home with the catch and Gran's chair was empty, her bobbins lined up on the sill. I have never been able to pick the red thread out of the hem of my own sail.