Black and grey poppy tattoo with a long thin stem and leaves running across the inner forearm, drawn in a botanical style with stippled shading at the centre.

Poppy with a long stem on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single open poppy in profile sits near the wrist, with a long thin stem that curves up the forearm and ends in a bud and two small leaves. The petals use bold outlines with fine hatched lines, and the centre is built up with dense stippling. The image is black and grey, and the tattoo fills the right half of the frame against a dark checked fabric in the background.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Poppy Flower Stem Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been told the poppies would not survive the wet spring, and for three weeks he kept the cloister garden's south wall well watered out of spite. The abbot said nothing about it. He only left a clean cloth folded on the bench each morning, as if the mud on Anselm's sandals were a sermon he had already heard.

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On the feast of Saint Cuthbert a boy from the village brought word that the carter had stopped at the lower gate with a load of grey stone from the quarry, and that the stone was for a new chapel bell-tower the bishop had promised and forgotten. Anselm went down with the cellarer to count the blocks. The carter, a broad man with a cough, lifted his cap and asked whether the monks wanted the stems of the wild red flowers that grew in the ditch by the road, because his daughter had been pressing them in a book and he had run out of pages.

Anselm did not answer at once. He was thinking of the one flower in the garden that had opened that morning, pale at the edges and dark at its heart like a coal under ash, and of how it had bent its neck toward the wall as though listening for something on the other side. He took a knife from his belt and cut a single stem from the ditch, long and thin and bristling with hair, and the carter watched him do it with the patience of a man who had seen monks do stranger things.

That evening Anselm pressed the flower between two leaves of the chapter register, beside the record of the spring rains. When the abbot found it, he turned the page slowly and left the book open to that place, and nobody moved it for a hundred years.