Colour poppy with black and grey botanical flowers and leaves tattooed across a shoulder and upper arm, with a green top visible.

Red poppy and botanical sketch on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A large red poppy with a detailed dark centre sits at the top of the shoulder, with black and grey botanical sprigs, coneflower-style blooms and spiky leaves running down the upper arm. A faint pink flower is also visible near the top edge. The poppy is shaded in warm reds and oranges, while the other elements use bold black outlines with grey shading, and the photo is taken close up with the subject's face not shown.

Botanical Neo-trad Shoulder Upper arm Poppy Flower Leaves Thistle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The poppies had come up along the lay-by at Thornely before the fair did, which Mae took as a bad sign, because her father always said poppies grew where something had been buried. She knelt in the verge with her sketchbook on her knee while the lorries grumbled past, drawing the bloom that had split its papery hood overnight. Its red was the colour of the paint on the carousel horses, and she meant to match it.

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Her father, Ernest Coyle, ran the bottle stall and kept a flat tin of pencils that had belonged to his mother, a botanical artist in Leeds before the war. Mae had pages of thistles, coneflowers from the allotments and the spiky dock leaves that grew behind the generators. He turned them over without comment until he reached the poppy, then tapped the centre with a nicotine-yellow finger. "Get the black right. Then the little white crown on top, like frost has got to it."

On the last night the fair packed up in rain. Mae found dry seed heads rattling in the verge, light as biscuit, and filled her coat pockets with them. When the wagons pulled out at dawn she stayed on the trampled ground where the ring had been, scattering seed and pressing it into the mud with her heel. Nobody came back to check on her, and nobody told her not to.

She sat down on the flattened grass and opened the sketchbook to a clean page. She drew the first bloom from memory, the centre in fine black hatching with a crown of white at its top, and left the petals unfinished, waiting for the colour to come up out of the ground.