Watercolour-style red poppies with buds and grey-green leaves tattooed down the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red poppies on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A bunch of red poppies on slender stems rises up the outer thigh, with two open blooms at the top, two smaller flowers lower down and closed buds. Soft, painterly shading and loose splashes of red, pink and grey-green give the flowers a watercolour look, with fine dark lines for the stems. The composition is vertical against a plain pale wall, and the design fades out at the top of the frame.

Botanical Thigh Poppy Flower Bud Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorothy had the seed packet in her coat pocket for three weeks before she found the nerve to push it into the soil of the balcony planter on the eleventh floor. The council had said no pots on the walkways, so she had hauled the old washing-up bowl up in the lift instead, cracked and rust-rimmed, and filled it with compost from the garden centre on Attercliffe Road. Her grandson called the flowers weeds. The woman across the landing called them a fire hazard.

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By June the poppies had come up in a ragged row, thin stems leaning out over the drop as if they were trying to see the car park. The first bloom opened on a Tuesday, crumpled like tissue and so red it looked wet. Dorothy stood in her dressing gown with a mug going cold and watched the petals loosen in the wind off the motorway. Below, a van reversed with a slow beeping that rose eleven floors and thinned to nothing.

Then the buds. There were five of them, green and tight, and she counted them every morning the way she used to count the children in the school yard, touching the air above each one. She pinched a stem for the vase on the sideboard, a single bloom in a jam jar, and the petals dropped on the carpet by evening. She swept them up and kept them in an envelope, not sure why.

When the council man came in August with his clipboard and his hi-vis, he looked at the bowl, looked at her, and wrote something down. "Well," he said. "They're not climbing the walls." Dorothy handed him a poppy wrapped in kitchen roll, and he took it, and that was the end of the matter.