Two views of a watercolour style upper arm tattoo with red poppies, fine black linework, a compass drawing and cursive script.

Red poppies and compass on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Large red poppies in a loose watercolour wash cover the upper arm and shoulder, outlined with fine black linework and dark ink splatters. A compass and gear-like mechanical drawing sits lower on the arm, and cursive script runs down the length of the arm. The image shows two angles of the same arm, with the red and black ink balanced across the piece.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Poppy Compass Gear Script Ink splatter Watercolour

Find an artist for this

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

The chart table in the back room at Penrose and Daughters smells of linseed oil and cold tea, and you have been bent over it since the tide turned. Gulls quarrel on the fish market roof. Old Abney wants the new breakwater plotted before the survey boat goes out, and every bearing you take with the brass compass comes out a fraction wrong, as if the harbour has decided to shift its feet.

Keep reading

You blame the poppies. They have crept into the margins all month, red wash bleeding past the ruled lines wherever your brush rests. Mrs Penrose found one pressed inside the tide tables and said nothing, only raised an eyebrow over her spectacles. The gears you sketched beside the compass rose were meant as a joke, a clockwork lighthouse for a man who distrusts anything that ticks, yet the rose and the wheel have started to agree with each other.

On the last evening of the month you lay the sheet flat under the lamp and see it. The breakwater runs straight through a ring of poppies, and when you follow the faint pencil of an older hand beneath your own, the flowers mark a true north. Someone long ago charted the same reef by flowers, not numbers. You fold the chart carefully, slide it into the oilcloth tube, and carry it down the cobbles to the quay, where Abney's boat knocks against the steps.

He takes the tube without looking at it. Your bearings are wrong, he says, every one of them. You say nothing and hand him the pencil. He unrolls the sheet across the thwart, squints at the poppies for a long moment, and then, very slowly, begins to laugh.