Black and grey botanical tattoo of a poppy bloom, bud and stem with leafy foliage running from the upper arm down the forearm.

Poppy tattoo running down the upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large poppy bloom sits on the upper arm, with a closed bud and a long thin stem curving down past the elbow. Below it, sprigs of serrated leaves trail down the forearm in fine black linework. The petals and centre are shaded in soft greys, while the stems and foliage are drawn with clean single lines on a plain pale background.

Botanical Fine line Upper arm Forearm Poppy Flower Bud Stem Leaves Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire will only last as long as you feed it. The pass above Carrow Gap is no road for a cart, and never was. The drovers who took sheep over it in my grandmother's day swore the high meadows ran red every June, and that the red came up through the scree the summer after a man had died on the path. Whether that was true, I could not tell you. I can tell you what the old woman Ysolde did about it.

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She kept a tin of dried poppy heads on the sill of her stone hut, and every spring she walked the switchbacks with a pocketful of seed, pressing it into the thin ground where the wind had stripped the grass. Her son had gone over the edge in a sleet storm, the year the bridge washed out, and nobody ever found him. The valley folk told her to stop, that seed would only grow where it pleased. She told them the poppy had never once asked anyone's leave.

She took ill in the third winter. The shepherds carried her down on a hurdle, and on the way they passed the one flower that had come up beside the hut. Its bud stayed shut, tight as a fist, though the weather had turned soft and the rest of the slope was already open. Ysolde had said it was waiting for someone to come back over the top. Nobody did. The morning after she died the bud split, and the long stem bent down toward the path, as though it were still watching for a boot on the stones.