Colour botanical tattoo of two red poppies with buds and green stems on the side of a person's back, in a soft watercolour style.

Red poppies on the side of a back

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A bare back in a black polka dot dress shows two red poppies with a closed bud and stems running vertically down the side of the torso. The petals have soft, bleeding edges and dark red shading, with green stems and small green leaves. The composition is tall and narrow, following the curve of the ribs.

Botanical Ribs Poppy Flower Bud Stem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seed packet had split along its fold, so the black specks ran into the lining of Nell's coat pocket, and she had to pick them out one by one with a wet thumb while the Tuesday goods came grumbling round the bend below the allotments. She stood on the cinder bank with the wind pushing at her skirt and counted what she had left. Forty, perhaps. Her grandfather had been a ganger on this stretch before the war, and he used to say poppies came up wherever the ground had been turned over and then forgotten about, as though the earth needed reminding that it was allowed to bleed a little.

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She scattered them in the strip between the fence and the sleepers where nobody walked, and she did not tell her mother, who would have called it a waste of good ground. Nothing came in April. Nothing came in May either, and by the time the hawthorn went over she had decided the seed was dead, like most things she had been given that year. Then in the second week of June a single bud split on a green stalk no thicker than a bootlace, and by the weekend there were three.

The flowers were not the hard, glossy red of the ones in the seed catalogue. They came out papery and thin, darker at the heart, and the colour ran outward into the petals as if the rain had got into the paint before it set. Nell went down most evenings after the shop shut to check on them, and once, kneeling in the cinders, she saw a young signalman standing above her on the footpath with his lamp unlit in his hand.

'Whose are these?' he asked, not unkindly.

She thought of the packet, and of her grandfather's hands, and of the forty seeds that had not been enough for anyone.

'Mine,' she said, which was not quite true. They had never belonged to anyone, and she suspected they would be there long after the line closed and the cinders were carted off, going red at the edges every summer for whoever bothered to look.