Watercolour-style red poppy tattoo with a closed bud and long stems running down the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red poppies down the lower back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

Three red poppy flowers and a closed bud are drawn on a bare lower back, with their stems running vertically across the skin. The petals use soft, wash-like shading in reds and pinks, with darker outlines and touches of green and brown in the stems. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame, with the rest of the back and a glimpse of denim at the bottom edge.

Botanical Back Poppy Flower Bud Stem Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's slick with the tide, and I'll not have you going down the harbour wall on my account. Sit by the stove. My grandmother used to say poppies grew wild on the cliffs above Porthkerris before anyone thought to plant them, and that they only ever bloomed in the summer the fishermen went out and didn't come back by the usual tide. Three boats went that year. Tom Pellow's Mercy was the last, and he had a bud of a daughter, Nell, who wouldn't stop picking the red flowers off the cliff path and pressing them into her books.

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Nell took the petals to the gull-woman who sold ribbons and needles at the back of the chandler's, and asked her to make a dye that would hold colour on linen. The woman laughed and said nothing holds colour in this town except salt. But she tried, and the first wash went on so pale it looked like a bruise after a week, and the second went on darker, the way blood goes into a sleeve. Nell kept at it through the winter with the stems in a jar on her sill, and by March the petals had gone the colour of the lamps the boats used to steer by.

When the Mercy finally came in, low in the water with nobody aboard but her father's cap tangled in the nets, Nell walked down to the slip and laid one of those flowers on the wet stones. The tide took it straight out. She said afterwards it was the only thing that year that went where it was meant to. Mind your footing on the way up now, and take the lantern. The wall is steeper than it looks in the dark.