Side ribs tattoo of a red poppy with black brushstroke swooshes and a printed lyric quote shaded in grey.

Red poppy and lyric quote on the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A red poppy-style flower sits on the side of the ribs, with loose black brushstrokes sweeping above and below it. A quotation in a typewriter-style font is set over a soft grey shaded area on the left, with the lyric lines running down the body. The red ink is applied in watercolour-like washes, and the black and grey shading gives the design a loose, painterly feel on a pale skin tone against a dark background.

Ribs Poppy Flower Brushstroke Quote Lyric Text

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

The Olivetti had been dying on the counter at the Sallow Wash fuel stop since before Tess took over, and by March it had lost the lower bar of its e, so every letter that needed one came out as a small dark cough. Ray sat on the stool beside it with his cap pushed back and dictated, which meant he argued with the page while she typed.

Keep reading

"Put that I was right about the culvert," he said. "Put that the county should have dug it deeper."

She typed it. She did not put that. She typed instead that the rain had come off Calder Mesa in one brown night, that the wash had taken the bridge, the Pemberton truck and most of the fence, and that the road was shut until the council said otherwise. Ray watched the carriage return with the look of a man counting money he had not earned.

After the water went down, the wash filled with poppies. Nobody had planted them. They came up in ragged red sheets along the bank, loose as spilled paint, and the drivers stranded by the closure slowed to photograph them through their windscreens. Ray stopped arguing. Every morning he walked out with a flask and stood at the edge of the flowers without saying anything.

On the last sheet of the day Tess typed the apology he would never say aloud, and she left the e's as they were, cough and all. He signed it with a shaky loop, tore the sheet from the platen, folded it into his shirt pocket, and went out to look at the flowers again, as if they might have been waiting to hear him say sorry.