Watercolour-style botanical tattoo of red poppies, buds and grey-green leaves on a thin stem across the upper chest near the collarbone.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red poppy sprig across the upper chest

Botanical · Chest · Colour · Photo

A sprig of red poppy-like flowers, a bud and grey-green leaves runs diagonally across the upper chest near the collarbone. The thin dark stems and soft, feathered edges give a loose, painterly finish, with the petals shaded in red and pink. Colour is concentrated in the flowers, with muted greens and grey tones in the leaves and shading against a plain light background.

Botanical Chest Poppy Flower Leaves Stem Bud Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The poppies came up in the wrong corner of the allotment the spring after my father died, a scatter of red where he had always grown beans. Mrs Okonedo next door leaned over the fence with her secateurs and said they were self-sown, the kind that turn up where the ground has been disturbed, and that I shouldn't pull them out just because nobody had planted them.

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I didn't pull them. I sat on his upturned crate with a flask of tea gone lukewarm and watched the buds tighten on their thin dark stems, each one hanging its head like it was thinking better of it. Then one morning a bud had split overnight, the petals crumpled like tissue paper that had been folded in a coat pocket, and by noon they had opened fully, papery and loud, bleeding a little red into the grey-green leaves at their base.

I cut a single sprig for the kitchen windowsill. It wilted by Thursday, the petals dropping one by one onto the oilcloth, and I kept meaning to throw it out. Instead I found myself picking up each fallen petal and pressing it flat in the pages of his seed catalogue, between the runner beans and the leeks.

By August the whole patch had gone to seed, dry pods rattling like small change. Mrs Okonedo came round with a paper bag and asked if she could have some for her own garden. I told her to take as many as she liked. He would have hated the mess, I said, and then I laughed, because it was the first thing I had said about him in months that did not sound like grief.