Black ink line drawing of a botanical bouquet of poppy, lavender, billy buttons and a feather, tied with twine, as a design sheet with no body placement shown.

Poppy, lavender and feather bouquet

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A bouquet of a poppy in bloom, a seed pod, sprigs of lavender, two round billy button heads and a large feather, gathered together and tied at the base with twine. The work uses fine black pen linework with dotted and hatched shading on the petals, feather and seed heads, and the white background leaves the design isolated on the page. It is shown in black and white with the whole bouquet centred on the page.

Botanical Poppy Lavender Feather Bouquet Seed pod

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind up here likes to listen in, and it will carry the wrong half of the tale back down to the valley if you let it. Right. Now. You will want to know why Maud Scarrow tied a bouquet on the lip of the pass the morning her brother walked over, when everyone else was tying nothing but their collars against the cold.

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She cut it from the bank below the cairn. A poppy first, though it was past its best, the petals gone like crumpled letters, and she kept its seed head because a head full of seeds is a promise that next year comes. Then three sprigs of lavender, for the smell of the linen her mother had pressed for him. Two billy buttons, round as bread rolls and furred with tiny knots, for luck on the ewes in the top field that had never once lost a lamb. And last, a long grey feather she found caught on the wire fence, a wood pigeon's or a buzzard's, nobody could agree, and she laid it along the stems like a flag on a mast.

Brother Tam took the bundle and said it was a fool's gift for a man carrying salt. She bound it with twine from the cart, looped twice and knotted hard, and he laughed and tucked it into his coat.

Now here is the turn, and mind your cups. Three winters on, a carter came over the top with a bundle and no sign of Tam. The twine was still on it. Inside, the poppy had dried to paper, the lavender held its scent, and the feather had gone the colour of wet slate. Maud worked the knot loose and found a note folded flat between the stems, in Tam's hand, saying only that he had kept the twine and walked the long way round.