Watercolour-style red poppies and two black birds in flight, tattooed on the outer thigh.

Red poppies and birds on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows three red poppies on slender stems, with two black birds in flight, one large and one small, set against soft pink wash. The poppies are shaded with smooth gradients and the birds have fine feather detail in black. Red and pink tones dominate the composition, which flows diagonally down the thigh.

Botanical Thigh Poppy Bird Crow Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Tanner had sold poppies from a barrow on the Porthkennick quay for thirty years, and she knew the crows by their walk long before she knew anything else about them. The big one strutted between the tar barrels as if it owned them. The smaller one, its left wing torn at the tip, never landed at all. It dropped in over the barrow, took a look at her, and was gone again, like a debt nobody intended to pay.

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The spring the herring boats came home empty, a young man called Caleb Roe climbed the hill with a sack of seed and a debt of his own. He wanted her to help him sow the red field above the cliff, the one the gulls had left alone since the fire. 'Poppies don't pay,' she told him. 'They flower and they drop.' He scattered the seed anyway, on his knees, muttering the names of the boats he had lost.

By June the field bled red from the cliff edge to the chapel wall, and the crows came to it in pairs. Nell watched them lift off the wind with their wings spread wide, each carrying a single petal out over the water and letting it fall into the cove. She asked Caleb why. He shrugged and said his gran had claimed the birds took the flowers' last words out to sea so the drowned would hear them.

In August she found a dried poppy head pressed flat in the folds of her net, and beside it a tin of Caleb's seed, unopened and labelled for next year. The torn-winged bird never came back. Nell tucked the tin into her apron, walked down to the quay, and stood by the barrow until the big crow landed on the rail and looked at her as if she owed it money.