Red poppy flowers with grey stems and buds in a painterly botanical tattoo on the lower leg near the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red poppies on a lower leg

Botanical · Calf · Mixed · Photo

Three red poppies, one in bloom and two partly open, sit on fine dark stems with grey seed buds and small sprigs. The petals are shaded with soft red washes and the stems are rendered in grey, giving a watercolour-like effect. The design curls up the leg from the ankle, with the lighter skin and a pair of patterned shoes in the background.

Botanical Calf Poppy Flower Stem Bud Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down and mind the kettle. You want the one about Nan's red flowers? Right. When the Glebe pit was still breathing, nothing grew on the tip behind Hartley Row but black grit and the odd dock. Then one summer the slag went quiet and up came poppies, three of them, thin-stemmed as a whippet's legs and wearing their red like they'd borrowed it from a better coat.

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Old Walter Dunn, who ran the pit pony stable, swore they came up where his boy had been buried under a fall the winter before. Nobody argued with him in the Crown, for he had a fist like a shovel and grief in him that wouldn't go down with bitter. So folk left them be. Women picked a bloom for a funeral, kids pressed the petals between the pages of their Bibles, and the tip began to look less like a wound.

Then the council sent men with a dozer to level it for the new bungalows. Nan went up at dawn in her housecoat and sat on the bank with her knitting. Would they have to run over her, she asked the foreman, or would he kindly go round the poppies? He went round. Nobody in Hartley Row ever learned whether it was the red or the old woman's face that stopped him, and Nan never said.

The bungalows went up on the far side. The three poppies are still on that bank, dropping their seed on the wind every June, and when you pass one you do what Nan did. You nod to it, and you keep your boots off the grass.