Painterly red poppy tattoo with a green stem and bud on the inner forearm, close to the wrist.

Red poppy on the inner forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large red poppy bloom with dark centre and green stamens sits on the inner forearm, its stem running down toward the wrist and ending in a small green bud with fine dark sprigs. The petals are rendered with soft, blended edges and varied reds, giving a watercolour-like effect. The colour is vivid against the pale skin, and the composition is framed by a dark vignette around the arm.

Botanical Forearm Poppy Flower Stem Bud Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have carried the tin for eleven weeks, wedged between the bosun's spare fids and a jar of mango chutney, and by now the lid has taken the shape of your thumb. The steamer is out past the Azores and the swell has been heavy since Tuesday. Every night you open the tin in the lamp-room, tip a pinch of seed into your palm, dark as gunpowder, and count them the way your mother counted stitches.

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Mrs Ashdown's garden backs onto the marsh at Faversham, and she pressed the tin into your hands on the quay with a warning: poppies don't travel, they sulk. She wanted them planted at a churchyard in a country you can barely pronounce, where her son lies under a stone with no flowers on it. She made you promise to do the planting yourself. You promised that. You promised nothing about the weather.

In the third week the sea came into the forward hold and the tin went under. You found it at dawn, swollen and rust-spotted, the seed clumped into a grey paste. You spread it on the galley windowsill to dry, and the cook threatened to throw it over with the peelings. Then on the nineteenth morning a green shoot no longer than a fingernail had pushed up through the paste, bent like a question mark, and was leaning toward the porthole light.

Off Cape Verde you carried it up to the boat deck in a cracked saucer. The ship rolled, and you held the saucer against your chest with both hands. The bud at the top had split its green sheath. Inside, a red thing lay folded tight as a fist, opening a little more each time the sun came round the bow.