Realistic red poppy tattoo with grey swirl linework across a woman's shoulder and upper arm.

Red poppies across a shoulder and upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A cluster of large red poppies with dark centres and grey stamens spreads from the upper arm over the shoulder and onto the upper chest. Shading gives the petals soft, rounded volume, while thin grey swirling lines add a secondary flourish beside the flowers. The red ink dominates against a plain black top and dark background, and the framing shows the shoulder, collarbone and upper arm.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Poppy Flower Swirl Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The poppies came up in the yard the summer after the Pryce boys' house came down, which nobody expected, least of all Mrs Halloran, who had spent four years scraping soot off the back wall and calling it hers. They came up through the broken brick in ones and twos, then all at once, so that by August the whole rubble heap was spilling red over its edge as if something had been knocked over and nobody had thought to mop it up.

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My brother Tom said they were a waste of good ground. He was home that year with one arm in a sling and very little patience, and he would stand at the kitchen window tutting at them. I cut them and stood them in jam jars on the sill, the petals so thin the light came through, and he moved the jars every time I turned my back. 'Poppies are for dead men,' he said. 'Don't you dare put them on the table.'

So one evening I took a jar out to the wall and sat with my back against the brick. The stamens stood up dark and fine as pins, and a bee went in and out of one, slow and drunk on it. I thought about the seed heads I'd been keeping in a paper bag since June, rattling like dice, and how Mrs Halloran had shaken one into her palm and said, 'Well, they'll come back whether we ask them or not.'

Tom came out at dusk and stood looking at the heap for a long time. Then he took the jar from my hands, pulled out one flower and tucked it behind my ear the way Dad used to do with a pencil. 'Next year, then,' he said, and went back inside without another word about it.