Colour botanical tattoo of a red poppy with buds and green leaves on the inner forearm, shown with the hand raised.

Red poppy sprig on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A poppy plant with one open red flower, three closed buds, green serrated leaves and exposed roots runs up the inner forearm. The linework is fine and the petals and leaves have soft, graduated shading in red and green. The design sits on the forearm near the wrist against a plain light background.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Poppy Flower Bud Leaves Stem Root Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hollis had told the boy to dig deeper, because a poppy that snapped at the crown was no use to a botanical painter. He knelt in the verge outside Thaxted with a trowel and a tin of damp muslin, the August wind pulling at the seed heads along the ditch. The plant came up whole at last, roots trailing like wet thread, a fistful of soil still clinging to them.

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Back in the studio over the chemist's, Hollis pinned the sprig to a board and set a glass of water beside it so the flower might hold its colour a little longer. She worked in the thin light from the north window. She had painted poppies for thirty years, for seed catalogues and for a publisher in Cambridge who paid late. The buds she drew first, because they were hardest: green at the tip, with a pale red showing through the sepals like a flush on a cheek held too close to the fire. Then the open flower, which would not last the afternoon.

By evening the petals had begun to fall. She painted the last one from memory, adding the dark smudge at its heart. The boy came up the stairs with his hands still grubby and asked whether the plant would live. She said it would not, but the roots were in the picture now, and that counted for something. He nodded as though she had quoted him the price of bread, then went down again. The board stayed on the easel until the paint dried, the stem bent slightly towards the window as if it were still looking for light.