Poppy sprig on a forearm
Fine line · Forearm · Colour · Photo
A hand is raised against a weathered turquoise painted door, with a botanical sprig tattooed on the forearm. The sprig has two open red poppies, a red bud, and several small closed buds on thin dark stems, with green feathery leaves. The linework is delicate and the red and green colour is soft, set against the skin on the lower arm.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The seed packet had split in the post, so Mrs Aldous's grandson found the poppies loose in the bottom of the parcel, rattling like sand in a boot. He brought them to the potting shed, where you were already counting out pots with a dry thumb and a bad temper. "They're from Harriet," he said. "She says they're the wild ones from the cutting by the railway, and she's sorry about the jam."
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You tip the seed onto a folded sheet of newspaper and tilt it toward the window. The grains are the colour of wet slate, finer than pepper. Harriet has always been careless with envelopes and exact with weather. Last summer she sent you a pressed sprig with its stems still bent the way the wind had left them, and you pinned it above the bench, where it dropped one brittle petal every time the door opened.
Nothing sprouts in February, and you know that. You sow them anyway, shallow in a tray of sifted loam, and press nothing down, because poppies want light on them to wake. In May the bed by the wall goes red for a week, then the petals fall in a litter like spent matches, and what is left is the seedhead, a grey cup with a lid you can shake like a pepper pot.
Keep the last of it for Harriet. Wrap the heads in brown paper, write her name in your best hand, and walk them to the post office before the light goes.
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