Watercolour-style tattoo of two red poppies with green leaves and a small script word on the inner forearm.

Red poppies on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two red poppies in bloom, with one flower higher up the forearm and a second lower down, joined by thin dark stems and green leaf shapes. The petals are rendered with soft, blended washes of red and pink, with dark purple-black centres and loose edges that suggest a watercolour painting. A small script word sits near the top right of the design, and the photo is taken against a dark background with a light textured fabric at the left edge.

Botanical Forearm Poppy Flower Leaf Stem Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had found its way under the awning again, so Ruth was on her knees on the wet cobbles, wedging the last crate of poppies against a trestle leg before the water could reach the stems. Down Tanner Row the other stallholders were shouting over the drum of it, tarpaulins sagging with rainwater that they tipped off with brooms. Nobody came to market in weather like this. That was why she came early.

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The man arrived just as she had given up on the day. He wore a green oilskin gone grey at the shoulders and stood looking at the buckets without touching anything. "The red ones," he said finally. "The ones with the black middles. My wife used to paint them, before her hands went." Ruth didn't ask what that meant. She drew her penknife from her apron pocket, cut two long stems low down where the blooms were heaviest, and wrapped them in a cone of brown paper already soft at the corners.

He paid with a coin so worn the king's face had nearly gone, and when she tried to give him change he shook his head and pressed it back into her palm. She gave him a third stem anyway, a bud still closed tight, and he looked at it for a long moment. "She always kept one in reserve," he said. "Said you never knew when you'd need a spare." Then he turned up his collar and went off up the Row, the paper darkening where the rain got through.

Ruth stood with the coin in her fist while the bucket water slopped against the crates. The petals that had dropped onto the cobbles had bled into the puddles, red going pink at the edges, and for a while the whole pitch looked like something someone had started to paint and then abandoned. She kept the coin. She sold the rest by noon.