Traditional style colour tattoo on a forearm showing a red flower, yellow bud, green leaves and a blue banner reading LET THINGS HAPPEN.

Red flower and banner on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A red flower with black outlines sits at the centre of the design, with a yellow bud above and green leaves around its stem. A blue banner across the lower part carries the words LET THINGS HAPPEN in black capitals. The bold outlines and flat, saturated fills are typical of traditional tattooing, shown in a close photograph of a forearm.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Flower Poppy Bud Leaves Banner

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been crouched over the planter since six, lifting the soil with a teaspoon and pinching aphids off the new shoots, when Mrs Pryce from flat 1107 leans out of her kitchen window with a mug in one hand and tells you to put the spoon down.

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"Seed doesn't want your hands on it," she says. She has grown things on the eleventh floor for thirty years, marigolds and runner beans in old paint tins, and the only rule she has ever given you is the one she gives now. Let things happen. You ask what that means for the poppies, the ones you bought from the garden centre on the ring road and have watered every morning since March, and she shrugs and says the wind will bring what it brings.

So you stop. You stop testing the soil with your fingertip and stop reading the packet in the lift. The lift is broken again, so you take the stairs, eleven flights, counting the tags on every landing and nodding to the lad who sells phone chargers from the bottom step. Some mornings the only thing that changes is the traffic on the bypass.

On the Thursday a gust off the hills catches the dry stalks and rattles them loose, and when you come out with your tea you see a single bud standing taller than the rest, swollen and green-gold, nodding over the car park. It is not yours. It came from somewhere you will never find. Mrs Pryce raises her mug to it across the balcony wall, and you raise yours back, and for once you do not reach for the spoon.