Realistic red poppy tattoo with watercolour-style splashes and black line swirls across the upper arm and shoulder.

Red poppies with ink swirls on shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

Two large red poppies are rendered in a realistic style, with soft shading, glossy petal highlights and a dark centre showing stamens. Loose blue and pink watercolour-like washes sit behind the flowers, with thin black linework trailing across them. Colour dominates the piece, and the composition wraps over the shoulder and down the upper arm.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Poppy Flower Petal Stamen Watercolour Linework Swirl

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't look at me like that, I'm getting to the poppies. Your grandad had his hand on the rail of the balcony, and the band was playing something slow with a saxophone that sounded like it had been left out in the rain. Nobody danced in those days until the bandleader said so, and he never said so until the clock over the door struck eleven.

Keep reading

Mary Ashdown came in late that Saturday in a red coat the colour of wet brick, with a flower pinned at her collar. A poppy, though it was February and there wasn't a field for fifty miles. Some said she'd grown it in the window of the draper's. Some said she'd painted it on with a wet brush. I know that the blue cigarette smoke drifted round her like something spilled, and the black ribbon of her scarf unspooled behind her every time she turned.

He asked her to dance. She said she would dance once, and only if he could follow a lead that went backwards, and he said he would try. They went round the floor so badly that the whole hall stopped to watch, and then, somehow, they stopped going badly at all. At the last chord she unpicked the poppy and laid it on the rail. When he reached for it, it was already gone, leaving only a pink stain on the wood that the caretaker never managed to scrub out.

So that's the dance hall, and that's the flower. Mind the stain on the third step when you go down. It's been there longer than any of us.