Colour botanical tattoo of two red poppies on a stem with a seed pod, leaves and a beetle, running down a person's back and side.

Red poppies and beetle down the back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

Two large red poppies with dark centres sit on a long green stem that curves down the back, with a grey-shaded seed pod, outlined leaves and a brown beetle near the lower side. The petals are shaded with red, orange and dark tones to give them volume, while the leaves and beetle use black linework with lighter fills. Red and green dominate the composition, and the design fills the frame from the shoulder blade down towards the waist.

Botanical Realism Back Poppy Beetle Seed pod Leaves Stem Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been told the poppies would come back where the plough had turned them under, and she didn't believe it until the second week of June, when the first scarlet rag of petal split the barley stubble by the ditch. Her father would have walked straight past them. He used to say weeds were only flowers with bad manners, and he had spent forty years making sure nothing with manners got a foothold on the Long Acre.

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By July there were two that mattered, both on the same green stem, nodding at her every time she came past with the water can. Beneath the lower one a seed pod had swelled grey-green and hard as a pigeon's egg, and on the ragged leaves beside it a cockchafer had settled, brown as a conker and busy with its own business. Nell flicked at it with her glove. It turned its back on her and went on eating, unbothered, as if the field had been waiting for it.

The solicitor's letter came on a Tuesday, asking whether she had decided about the sale. She read it standing in the yard with the kettle going cold behind her. Men from the cooperative wanted the acreage clear by harvest, and they would not want flowers in the headland. She folded the letter small and put it in her apron pocket.

That evening she went out with the light going pink over the sugar beet. She cupped the seed pod in her palm and gave it a shake beside her ear, and the seeds rattled inside like coins in a tin. She left the stem standing, and the beetle too, and walked back to the house with her hands empty.