Colour tattoo of red and orange poppies on stems with green leaves and buds, running down the upper back in a painterly botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Poppy sprig on the upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A sprig of three poppies, two open blooms and one closed bud, with thin green stems and leaves runs vertically down the centre of the back. The petals are shaded with soft washes of red, orange and pink that blend into the skin, giving a watercolour effect with dark centres and loose edges. The tattoo fills the middle of the frame against a plain pale back, with a dark top and a blurred wooden background behind.

Botanical Back Poppy Flower Stem Bud Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marion, you asked in your last card whether I ever finished the poppies for Mrs Harcourt's wall, and I have to confess I never did. I got as far as the stems. Every time I dipped the brush in the red I thought of the field behind the depot at Hallow Green, the summer the rain came in sideways and the poppies stood up through the sheep wire as if nobody had told them there was a war on.

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The trouble with watercolour, as Mr Pell kept telling us at the night class, is that you cannot take anything back. The paper drinks whatever you give it. You lay the orange on wet, let the red bleed into it, then walk away and trust the edges to find their own shape. He said the dark heart of a poppy was the one place you had to be sure, so I saved a little Payne's grey for those and wiped the brush twice before I touched it.

Last Thursday I finally carried the old sketchbook down to the bus shelter, where Lorna Pritchard was waiting with her two grandsons and a tin of humbugs. She looked over my shoulder at the closed bud, the one I had kept so tight and green, and said it looked like it was thinking about something. I told her it was only waiting for the right morning.

I have decided that is how I will finish it. The bud stays shut, the other two open where the light falls, and Mrs Harcourt can have her wall when she is ready to look at it properly. Write and tell me how the new hip is coming along, and whether Dennis still owes you a pound from the raffle.