Realistic red poppy and grey flower tattoo covering the shoulder and upper arm, with a small faded tattoo shown in an inset photo.

Red poppies and grey flowers on upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

Large realistic flowers with red petals and dark centres are tattooed across the shoulder and upper arm, with greyscale blooms and dark stems filling the spaces between them. The petals use smooth shading and highlights for a three-dimensional effect against a black top. A small inset photo in the lower left shows a faded, older tattoo of a line-drawn figure.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Poppy Flower Anemone Petal Stem Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been up the ladder since six, and the Cox's are dropping into your hands as if they have been waiting all summer for permission. Along the headland, where nobody bothers to mow any more, the poppies have gone over into a scatter of red seed heads and late bright petals, so loud against the grey stems that the pickers stop to look. Your mother used to call them weeds. Your father let them stand, and you have never once asked him why.

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Dell Whitcombe comes up the row with a crate on each hip and asks whether you are going to the fair in Ledbury on Saturday. You say you have the grafting to finish. He does not believe you, and he does not argue either. He has the same squint your father had in the last August before the stroke, the look of a man who reads weather in the bark. He sets the crates down, says the wasps are bad on the south side, and then you both stand there listening to the hum of the trees.

That evening, in the shed, you find the orchard ledger on the shelf above the sprayer. Your father's columns run down the pages by variety and planting year, Bramley, Blenheim, Egremont Russet, until the last entry in pencil that is not a tree at all. Pressed flat between two pages is a poppy, dried to tissue, its centre gone to a black knot. Beneath it he has written: Sold the Blenheims. Kept the red.

In the morning you walk out to the headland with your secateurs and cut the stems low by the wall, so the seed will scatter where the ground is turned. It is not much of an answer. But the ladder is still leaning in the grass, the wasps are already gathering on the windfalls, and you find you are whistling.