Black line-art tattoo of poppies, a ranunculus and a dahlia in a fine line botanical style on a forearm, resting on a wooden table.

Poppy, ranunculus and dahlia line tattoo on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bare forearm and hand rest on a pale wooden table, with a floral tattoo running from the wrist towards the elbow. The design shows an open poppy, a layered ranunculus and a dahlia, with small buds and a few tiny blooms filling the gaps. The linework is thin and black with no shading or colour, and the flowers are arranged in a loose vertical cluster that fills the upper half of the forearm.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Poppy Dahlia Flower Bud Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't put the kettle on yet, you'll miss the part where the poppy comes in. The winter the boat stopped running, the only seed left on Skerrin was a biscuit tin of mixed packets under Nan Oighrig's bed, and she would not open it for anyone, not even the minister with his good boots.

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So the bairns went out with a spade and a bucket of sea-wet peat to the lee of the dyke, where the wind lay down. They dug a row for each flower her mother had named. Poppies first, red as a cut thumb, petals so thin the morning came through them like light through a shop window. Then the ranunculus, which her mother called the mad ones, layered like a wedding skirt and never the same twice. Last the dahlias, stiff and bossy, which a ewe had once eaten to the stalk and still they came back to spite her.

Nothing showed that spring. Nothing showed the next. In the third June Ailsa Gunn knelt by the dyke with her ear to the grass, as if the ground might tell her something, and heard only gulls and the tide dragging the shingle. She went home and said the garden had failed. Nan Oighrig took the tin from under the bed, shook it beside her ear, and said that was the sound of things waiting.

They came up in July, all three at once, the poppies first, then the mad ones, then the dahlias standing like sergeants at the end of the row. When the boat finally came the captain asked where on earth a rock like this had found such colour, and Ailsa said from my nan's tin, and he asked what was left in it now. Nothing, she said. You can't keep a thing that's already been planted.