Fine line botanical tattoo of red poppies and seed heads on a lower leg, seen through bubbles in a bath.

Red poppies on a lower leg in a bath

Botanical · Calf · Colour · Photo

A bare leg rests in a bath of foam and greenish water, with a sprig of red poppies and seed heads tattooed down the shin. Two large poppy blooms sit at the bottom, with smaller buds and thin stems rising toward the knee. The linework is fine and the petals are softly shaded in red, with dark centres and green-brown seed heads for contrast.

Botanical Fine line Calf Poppy Flower Bud Stem Leg

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the kettle's still warm, and mind the dog, she thinks every stranger carries biscuits. You want the poppies. Everyone wants the poppies. The rain came to Sallow Wells in March, the first in four years, and it arrived in the afternoon like a bad-tempered uncle, slapping the tin roofs and running off down the wash before anybody found a bucket.

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Ada Pell drove the water truck out of Sallow Wells that week, fourteen miles of washboard road to the Hadley mine, and at every bend the ground had gone soft and green. By the Thursday the verges were red. Not a little red, mind. Red like someone had spilt a whole tin of paint and the desert had decided to keep it. Two great blooms hung off the shoulder of the road, papery as a letter read too often, their black hearts open to the sun, and along the wire fence the buds stood up on thin stalks like men waiting to be called in for their tea.

Ada had a galvanised bath lashed in the back of that truck, her grandmother's, because the tank had cracked in the heat. She filled it from the cistern at the mine and dragged it to the roadside, and she sat there with the water going cool around her while the wind combed through the stems. Nobody came past. Nobody needed the truck that day. She said afterwards it was the first time in her life she'd been told to stop and look at something, and she'd done it.

By dusk the poppies had folded shut, every one, the way my mother folded a sheet, corner to corner, and by morning the road was only road again, bleached to paper before the dust could get at it. Ada never took the bath back. It's still out there by the fence, rusted to lace. Go past in the spring and you'll see green rings where it stood, and the poppies coming up round them as though they've been asked in.