Red poppy tattoo in a neo-traditional style with bold black outlines and a yellow centre, on the outer arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red poppy on an arm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A single open red poppy with a yellow centre and grey stamens fills most of the frame, with its petals drawn in layered shapes. Bold black outlines define the petals, with solid red fill and small areas of shading that give the petals some depth. Parts of other tattoos are visible at the top left and right edges, and the flower is set against plain pale skin.

Neo-trad Botanical Forearm Poppy Flower Petal Stamen

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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 band has started up again before you have got your gloves off, and Maurice is already threading between the tables towards you, his hat held against his chest the way he holds it when he has made up his mind. You look somewhere else. You look at the mirrored pillars and the couples turning under the lights, and you do not look at the poppy pinned to your lapel, though you pinned it there yourself at six o'clock, after your mother asked for the third time whether you meant to wear that red thing to a dance.

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It came from the waste ground behind the gasworks, where the poppies grow in the cinders every June as if nobody had told them the land was spoiled. You cut it with your mother's kitchen scissors and carried it wrapped in a damp handkerchief all the way along Canal Street, and by the time you reached the Palais the petals had gone soft at the edges. Maurice does not mention it. He only says your name the way people say a name they have practised, and asks whether you might give him the next dance and the one after that.

You give him three. Between them the petals loosen, one at a time, and drop onto the sprung boards, small and bright as spilt paint. Each time you turn, you see a little more of the yellow centre, the grey pins of the stamens showing where the red has let go. Maurice steps around each fallen petal without breaking the rhythm of his feet, and you think that is the kind of man you could marry, if you were the sort of woman who married at all.

When the band plays the last waltz he stoops, quick and careful, and lifts the one petal lying nearest the bandstand. He folds it twice, presses it into his breast pocket, and tells you he will keep it until you decide which of you was brave enough to ask first.